Syllabus bites Electricity

Currents and Circuits

Take care

Warning icon

Electricity can be dangerous. You certainly don’t want an electric current to pass through you!

Explore Ausgrid’s Learning resources or go straight to the Kids Safety Zone. You could also explore Lesson 1 from Electric Kids to find some dos and don’ts about electricity.

Create a circuit

How do we make electricity do useful work?

We can use electricity to light a bulb, sound a buzzer, turn a motor or produce some heat.

Experiment yourself by creating a circuit using components similar to those below, or use an online resource to find ideas for experiments.

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Each person or group will need:

  • Insulated wires and connectors

  • Some small batteries – AAA or AA size are ideal

  • Switches

  • Low voltage light bulbs

  • Materials to test – plastics, cloth, metals (e.g. a spoon)

  • Maybe a buzzer or small motor

  • Some resistance wire, or an ordinary ‘lead’ pencil, sharpened at both ends.

Warning icon

If you connect a pencil into a circuit, be careful – it might get hot!

Draw a circuit diagram

Electricity needs a path to travel along. It needs to start from one place, move along the path, do the work we need it to and return to where it came from. These paths are called circuits. If you break the circuit, the electricity stops flowing.

Could you draw the circuit diagram for the experiment on the left?

Circuit diagram showing a power supply, an open switch and two lamps connected in series.

In this circuit, the lamp would not light up because the switch is open.

Use straight lines to represent wires. There are special symbols to use to represent the power supply (the battery) and the lamp.

Question icon

What would happen if the switch were closed? What would happen if there were two lamps in the circuit?