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我相當認同親自動手做的學習方式，但你必須擁有適當的工具。如果我要教女兒電學，我不會給她焊槍。同樣的，如果她用電路板，對她的小手來說是非常麻煩的。所以我優秀的學生Sam和我，決定著眼於我們能想到最實際的東西－黏土。所以我們花了整個夏天，研究不同黏土的配方。曾經做過自製黏土的人或許會對這些配方感到很熟悉，這些標準原料或許在你的廚房中就有。我們最喜愛的配方有兩種，一種含有這些原料（水、麵粉、鹽、植物油、塔塔粉），第二種則是用糖來代替鹽，而且效果很棒。我們可以用它來做這些很棒的小雕塑品。
但更酷的是，如果我們把它們放在一起，你看到那個很鹹的黏土，它會導電，這不是什麼新發現，其實市售的一般黏土也可以導電，中學的物理老師已經使用這個許多年，但我們自製黏土的電阻事實上是市售黏土的一半。那麼糖黏土呢？它的電阻比鹽黏土大一百五十倍，這意味著什麼？這意味著如果你將它們放在一起，就會形成電路，一雙有創造力的小手可以自行完成的電路。
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以下為系統擷取之英文原文
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, if 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 dough. And so we spent a summer looking at different play dough recipes. And these recipes probably look really familiar to any of you who have made home-made 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.
But the really cool thing about them is when we put them together. You see that really salty play dough, well it conducts electricity. And this is nothing new. It turns out that regular play dough that you buy at the store conducts electricity, and high school physics teachers have used that for years. But our home-made play dough actually has half the resistance of commercial play dough. 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.
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我來做個小示範。如果我拿這個鹽黏土，它或許跟你們小時候玩過的差不多，然後我將它通電，這是個二鉛電池組，很簡單的電池組，在Radio Shack（美國電子零售商）或其他許多地方都買的到。我們確實可以讓燈亮起來，但如果在座各位有學過電子工程，我們也可以創造出短路。如果我把這些放在一起，燈會熄滅。好的，電流想通過黏土而不是LED燈。如果我將它們分開，燈會再度亮起。現在，如果我拿那塊糖黏土，糖黏土不想傳導電流，像是擋住電流的牆壁，如果我將它放在中間，現在所有黏土都彼此接觸，但當我把燈插回去時，它會亮起來。事實上我還可以在雕塑品中加入一些動作，如果我想要一條旋轉尾巴，我們可以拿一個馬達，覆上一些黏土，然後將它插上去，我們就有旋轉的尾巴了。
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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.
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當你學會這些基本電路後，就可以做些稍微複雜的電路。我們稱這個為壽司電路，非常受孩子們歡迎。同樣的，我將它插電，現在我可以開始探討並聯和串聯，我可以插進很多燈泡，我們可以開始探討如電負載量之類的知識，當我插進很多燈泡又加上馬達時會怎樣？燈泡會變暗。我們甚至可以加上微處理器，將這個當作輸入端，創造出模糊音效。你可以讓孩子用這個做出並聯和串聯的電路組合。
這些都是你廚房裡就有的東西，我們試著將它改造成電子工程實驗室，我們有個網站完整描述了在家中製作的方法，網站上也有一些影片，你們可以自己製作。有趣的是，自從我們將它放上網後，看見這個計畫所造成的影響。有個在猶他州的媽媽和她孩子，做這個給英國的科學研究人員以及夏威夷的課程開發者觀賞。
所以我鼓勵大家都拿起一些黏土、一些鹽、一些糖，然後開始動手玩。我們一般不會將廚房當作電子工程實驗室，或將小朋友視為電路設計師，但也許我們應該這麼想。
祝你們玩得愉快！謝謝。
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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.
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.
So I encourage you all to grab some play dough, 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.
Have fun. Thank you.
