Make Your Own Science Toys Using daily Materials

Science based toys such as microscopes and chemistry sets are a great way to learn about the world around us.  We learn basic scientific system whilst we play, sometimes without even noticing. There are many science toys on the shop but in my opinion the best educational toys are the ones you can make yourself.

The first science toy I ever made was the old popular 'Plastic Cup Telephone'.  I first saw this on Blue Peter and it consisted of two plastic cups with a taut string joining them, the idea was that when somebody talked into one of the cups the vibrations would trip down the taut string and into the other plastic cup where the vibrating cup would cause the air in and around it to also vibrate, and so recreating the primary sound waves.

Microscope

This is not much dissimilar from how a real telephone works except that electric current replaces the vibrating string in a real telephone. The string phone I made back then worked well enough and filled me with pride as my brother and I relayed inexpressive messages to one another much to the annoyance of our slight sister.  But this vibrating string method had a rather serious drawback, the string needed to be taut and allowed to vibrate without anything touching it. And since this meant that it could not be used around corners our efforts to present from bedroom to bedroom came to nothing, however we did learn quite bit about science that day.

I have made many more science toys [http://www.sciencetoy.co.uk] since that one, and have recently made another telephone  which does not share the cup and string cornering disadvantages, I call it the speakerphone, and it is surprisingly easy to make.

To make a speakerphone you will need two speakers from an old stereo or a pair of old car speakers, preferably with a small number of speaker wire still on them.

Purchase a roll of speaker wire or similar two core cable, and use this to join the two speakers together, final to final using either solder, or if you managed to leave a small number of the primary wires in place, simply strip the wires back about 10mm and twist them together with the new wire, taping over later with insulating tape.

After this you should have the + final of speaker 1 connecting to the + terminal of speaker  2 and also the - terminal of speaker 1   to the - terminal of speaker 2.

Your speakerphone is complete! Now as you speak directly into a speaker, the sound waves from your voice cause the speaker cone to vibrate, as this vibrates it causes a small copper coil to vibrate over a magnet generating an electric current in the wire. This current travels straight through the speaker wire to the other speaker. As the current runs straight through the small copper coil at this end it turns the coil into an alternating magnet, which due to its presence to a large permanent magnet begins to vibrate in exactly the same way as the first coil which generated the current in the first place. This coil is attached to the speaker cone so causes the cone to vibrate which in turn causes the air to vibrate recreating our primary sound wave.

Make Your Own Science Toys Using daily Materials

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