Eighth Grade, Electricity & Electronics Science Projects (40 results)
Stop for a minute and try to imagine your world without electrical power and electronic gadgets. No convenient appliances in the kitchen, no electric lights. No computers, MP3 players, television, or video games. Your life would be completely different, wouldn't it? Electricity and electronics are so central to modern life that, paradoxically, they're easy to overlook.
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You can see examples of parabolic reflectors in flashlights, car headlights, satellite TV antennas, and even on the sidelines at football games. How do these "dish" antennas work to gather signals? What is the best position for placing the detector for these antennas? In this project, you can use an LED and a simple photodetector to find out for yourself.
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Maybe somewhere in your home there's a long hallway or a stairway with a light that you can turn on from either end. It's a nice convenience, but did you ever wonder how it's wired up to work that way? The goal of this project is to build a similar circuit with switches, flashlight batteries and a flashlight bulb (obviously, household circuits are not safe to experiment with). You'll need to understand the difference between connections made in series and connections made in parallel in an…
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In this science project, you will build what might be the world's simplest motor. It has just four basic parts: magnets, a battery, a screwdriver, and a short piece of wire. It takes only minutes to assemble, but it provides a wonderful device to explore how electricity and magnetism combine to produce a fast-spinning motor.
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An electric current produces a magnetic field. You can take advantage of this fact to make a simple apparatus to test the electrical conductivity of various materials, including both solids and liquids. The detector consists of a coil of wire, with a magnetic compass inside it. You connect one end of the coil to a D-cell battery. The other end of the coil is connected to whatever material you are testing, and the material, in turn, is connected to the other end of the D-cell. In other…
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Have you ever gotten a shock touching a doorknob after walking across a carpet? Static charge is responsible for that shock. Wouldn't it be cool to save up and store all of that charge in a homemade jar? It would almost be like storing lightning. This science project will show you how to do that.
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Have you ever seen night lights that automatically turn on when it gets dark? What about art projects, like paintings or sculptures, with embedded lights? This project will let you combine the two, by adding lights to an art project of your choice. You can make the lights automatically turn on when it gets dark using the
Raspberry Pi Projects Kit.
Check out the video to see what this simple, but fun, project looks like:
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Did you ever have a favorite toy like an action figure or doll that could light up, make noise, or move? This project will show you how to make your own interactive toy using the
Raspberry Pi Projects Kit.
Check out the video to see what this simple, but fun, project looks like. The version you make does not have to be a robot; it can be any shape and have any sound effects you want.
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You probably know that you can use iron filings to reveal the magnetic field produced by a strong magnet. If you sandwich the iron filings between pieces of waxed paper, you can make a permanent record of your magnetic experiments (Gardner, 2004, 66). Cover the wax paper sandwich with a layer of brown paper (from a roll, or cut open a paper shopping bag), and then (with an adult's help) use a hot, dry iron to seal the waxed paper together. You will have to experiment a little with your iron…
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Water is an interesting thing. We drink it, swim in it, and wash ourselves with it. We can get energy from
water by damming it and sending it through a turbine. But did you know that we can use the natural electrical
charges present in water and a Kelvin electrostatic generator to create sparks? You can even use a
Kelvin electrostatic generator to temporarily light a bulb! Now that is one bright idea!
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What's your favorite thing to do on the hottest day of the year? Dip your toes in an icy river? Hang out by the pool? Retreat to a cool basement? Lie motionless in the shade? You're probably not too eager to move around and put out a lot of energy, like mowing the lawn in the mid-afternoon sun. Well, you're not the only one. In this electronics science fair project, you'll find out that some semiconductor devices, like light-emitting diodes (or LEDs), act the same way. As their internal…
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