Since it’s mid-summer vacation time, there’s always that opportunity to share some good time with kids by helping them with crafts, scientific experiments and stuff like that. My 11 year old son Adi’s (Aditya) favorite subject is Physics and that’s the first book he opened – with some compulsion of course – for the next academic year. They will be getting introduced to a bit of electricity and magnetism in the coming academic year when he goes to the 6th standard.
This week, I thought of teaching (for a change) him a little bit about electric magnets, dynamos, electric motors etc since these were my favorite topics in school as well. As a matter of fact, my favorite subject was Physics as well.
I had built motors during my school times but it was always a bit complicated to get everything working together. But now things are different and there’s the Internet for your help. A little bit of browsing around and improvisation over several prototypes resulted in the following motor that Aditya and I built during this weekend.
It takes just some insulated copper wire (about 3ft), a magnet, a dry cell, two safety pins and some adhesive tape to build possibly the simplest motor out there. I made a video based on the little clips and photos taken during the process so that it might help some kids out there to build one.
(If you can’t watch the video here, please click this link)