Learn About Home Circuits - The Fun Way! (Sweet Suite 2020)
/Coverage by Young Jeohn
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Snap Circuits My Home shows you how power and electricity works at home in a fun, interactive way. It helps answers "what happens?" questions when you turn on the light switch or why the power goes out. It's one of three new products for STEM learning from Elenco.
Snap Circuits My Home
From apartments to houses, power works the same way no matter what kind of dwelling you live in. My Home teaches you how by simulating an electric network in a house that you can easily build yourself.
The kit comes with colored grids that let you design your house in many shapes. There are projects to show how different circuits connect and work, like doorbells, motors, generators and fans that can change speed. There’s also a meter that measures how much power is flowing, and that raises observations and questions like:
“This one circuit uses less energy than the other… what makes it more efficient?”
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Questions like these give kids an awareness of how important designs are and how they can save power. In the real world, it can translate into figuring out ways to lower electricity bills… especially after they see what we parents have to pay each month!
My Home comes with an illustrated guide explaining how the pieces work, how the circuits go together, and how electricity gets from the power company to your house - and how it travels through your walls. Availability is around September of 2020.
Snap Circuits Green Energy
The Green Energy set replaces Snap Circuit Green (from 2009) with up-to-date technologies in wind, water, and solar power, plus electric vehicles. It comes with a step-by-step project guide and a booklet called Think Green which discusses different kinds of alternative energies in the world.
Some of the bigger parts include:
Hand-cranked power generator
Voltage meter
Solar module
Wind module
Chemical power (using stuff at home, like lemons)
Rechargeable battery
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This awesome kit helps build up your logic, and the included electric car gets you started by introducing the question “How do you make the car run?”
Well, it needs energy - you could plug in the solar module directly, but it won’t work on cloudy days with no light. What then?
Using a battery will run without light, but you need to charge it up now and again. Will you do this by building a solar charge station? Or maybe wind power might be better!
There are many projects to get kids thinking about the different types of green energy available today. For those in a sunny climate, solar would be the way, whereas water and wind power might be a better option if you live in rainy, windy areas.
Snap Circuits My Home and Green Energy sets can be used interchangeably so you can mix and match; power up your My Home with solar or wind modules from Green Energy!
Snap Circuit Discover Coding
This is the first Snap Circuits product to integrate coding, which is accomplished via an app with a controller interface. Once you finish building your circuit, you connect the interface to LEDs, motors, and electronic devices. Simple drag-and-drop block coding is used, for example “turn the light on”. As the program runs, you can see the code execute your commands as you watch what it does.
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To add to the fun, the car module offers different driving interfaces, including traditional car controls (forward/back, turn right & left), tank controls (with left and right side forward & back) and touch drive controls. It’s great in making kids aware that steering wheels aren’t the only things that can control a vehicle.
The Snap Circuits Discover Coding app is available now for Android & iOS.
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More info: https://www.elenco.com
Event: Sweet Suite 2020
