I'm a huge believer in hands-on education. But you have to have the right tools. If I'm going to teach my daughter about electronics, I'm not going to give her a soldering iron. And similarly, she finds prototyping boards really frustrating for her little hands. So my wonderful student Sam and I decided to look at the most tangible thing we could think of: Play-Doh. And so we spent a summer looking at different Play-Doh recipes. And these recipes probably look really familiar to any of you who have made homemade play-dough -- pretty standard ingredients you probably have in your kitchen. We have two favorite recipes -- one that has these ingredients and a second that had sugar instead of salt. And they're great. We can make great little sculptures with these.
我是亲自实践教育的忠实拥护者。 但必须有合适的工具。 如果我准备教我女儿电子学, 我不会给她一个烙铁。 同样地,她发现模型 确实让她的小手觉得挫折。 因此我的好学生山姆和我 决定看看我们能想到的最切实的东西, 橡皮泥。 我们花了一个夏天来 考察各种不同的橡皮泥制作配方。 这些配方看起来非常相似 在座各位都可以在家中制作橡皮泥 -- 就用各位的厨房里大概都有的相当普通的佐料。 我们有两个最喜欢的配方 -- 一个包含这些成分 第二个的配方中用的是糖而不是盐。 它们非常棒。我们能用这些做出很棒的小雕塑。
But the really cool thing about them is when we put them together. You see that really salty Play-Doh? Well, it conducts electricity. And this is nothing new. It turns out that regular Play-Doh that you buy at the store conducts electricity, and high school physics teachers have used that for years. But our homemade play-dough actually has half the resistance of commercial Play-Doh. And that sugar dough? Well it's 150 times more resistant to electric current than that salt dough. So what does that mean? Well it means if you them together you suddenly have circuits -- circuits that the most creative, tiny, little hands can build on their own.
当我们把它们放在一起,真正酷的事发生了。 这是咸的橡皮泥, 它能导电。 这不是什么新鲜事儿。 其实在商店里购买的正规的橡皮泥都能导电, 高中物理老师已经使用了很多年了。 但我们自制的橡皮泥 实际上只有市场上橡皮泥电阻的一半。 那个糖橡皮泥呢? 它的电阻是咸橡皮泥的 150倍。 那么,这意味着什么? 这意味着把它们放在一起,突然间你就有了电路 -- 可以由富有创造力的小手们制作而成 的电路。
(Applause)
(掌声)
And so I want to do a little demo for you. So if I take this salt dough, again, it's like the play-dough you probably made as kids, and I plug it in -- it's a two-lead battery pack, simple battery pack, you can buy them at Radio Shack and pretty much anywhere else -- we can actually then light things up. But if any of you have studied electrical engineering, we can also create a short circuit. If I push these together, the light turns off. Right, the current wants to run through the play-dough, not through that LED. If I separate them again, I have some light. Well now if I take that sugar dough, the sugar dough doesn't want to conduct electricity. It's like a wall to the electricity. If I place that between, now all the dough is touching, but if I stick that light back in, I have light. In fact, I could even add some movement to my sculptures. If I want a spinning tail, let's grab a motor, put some play-dough on it, stick it on and we have spinning.
那么我来为你们做个小小的演示。 如果我拿着这个咸橡皮泥 -- 再说一次,这就像是各位在孩童时期玩的橡皮泥 -- 我把它插入 -- 这是一个双极式铅蓄电池,普通的电池 -- 可以在Radio Shack买到 几乎任何地方都有卖 -- 我们能让 灯亮起来。 但如果你们中有人学过电气工程的话, 我们也可以做出个短路来。 如果我把它们放在一起,灯就灭了。 是的,电流会通过橡皮泥,而不是通过那个LED灯。 如果我分开它们,灯就亮了。 现在,如果我用糖橡皮泥, 糖橡皮泥并不导电。 它像是一堵阻挡电流通过的墙。 如果我把它放在中间,所有的橡皮泥都接触在一起, 但如果我把灯插回去, 灯亮了。 实际上,我甚至能在我的雕塑上加些运动的部件。 如果想要个旋转的尾巴,就找个马达来, 在上面放些橡皮泥,插上去, 就会开始旋转了。
(Applause)
(掌声)
And once you have the basics, we can make a slightly more complicated circuit. We call this our sushi circuit. It's very popular with kids. I plug in again the power to it. And now I can start talking about parallel and series circuits. I can start plugging in lots of lights. And we can start talking about things like electrical load. What happens if I put in lots of lights and then add a motor? It'll dim. We can even add microprocessors and have this as an input and create squishy sound music that we've done. You could do parallel and series circuits for kids using this.
一旦有了这些基础, 我们就能制作一个稍微复杂些的电路了。 我们称这个为寿司电路。它非常受孩子们的欢迎。 我把电源插上去。 现在我可以开始讲讲并联和串联电路了。 我能插上很多灯泡。 我们也能开始谈谈像电力负荷这类事情了。 如果我放上许多的灯泡 然后再加上一个马达,会怎样? 灯变暗了。 我们甚至能加入微处理器 用这个作为输入 并创造出轻柔的音乐,我们曾这么做过。 可以让孩子们用这个来做 并联或串联电路。
So this is all in your home kitchen. We've actually tried to turn it into an electrical engineering lab. We have a website, it's all there. These are the home recipes. We've got some videos. You can make them yourselves. And it's been really fun since we put them up to see where these have gone. We've had a mom in Utah who used them with her kids, to a science researcher in the U.K., and curriculum developers in Hawaii.
这些在家里的厨房中就能做到。 实际上我们尝试过把它变成一个电气工程实验室。 我们有个网站,上面什么都有。这些是配方。 我们还有些视频。大家可以自己制作它们。 因为把这些东西制作出来并看着它们成功运行,实在是很有趣。 在犹他州有位母亲,与她的孩子们一起玩这些橡皮泥, 她的孩子成了英国的科学研究员 并在夏威夷开发新课程。
So I would encourage you all to grab some Play-Doh, grab some salt, grab some sugar and start playing. We don't usually think of our kitchen as an electrical engineering lab or little kids as circuit designers, but maybe we should.
因此我鼓励各位都抓把橡皮泥, 抓些盐,抓些糖,开始玩儿吧。 我们并不常把我们的厨房想象成电气工程实验室 或把小孩子们想象成电路设计师, 但也许我们应该这么做。
Have fun. Thank you.
玩得开心。谢谢
(Applause)
(掌声)