Electricity in Our Body - Thursday, 15/11/2018

    Yesterday, we had a really fun activity where we experimented with Makey-Makey's. I thought the activity was really fun and really used a lot of our brain power (which is good, by the way - in my opinion, at least). During Science time, our technology teacher, Mr. Katz, brought a few Makey-Makey's to show us and let us experiment with them. We had to connect the Makey-Makey's to the computer, and make a sound with it. There was a Makey-Makey software, where we could play songs with it by pressing the keys (it was a small piano with 6 notes) . Our 1st challenge was to make sounds on the "piano" without touching the keyboard. After about 3 minutes of messing around, we found out that all we had to do was to make the wires with "alligator clips" touch the metal parts on the top side of the Makey-Makey, which were labeled Earth. Different sounds would be produced as the different wires touched the Earth area.

A Makey-Makey (it actually is called a Makey-Makey for
a reason that I don't know) is basically a circuit board.

    Our next challenge took a long time to figure out. We had to find out how to make sounds on the piano without touching the Makey-Makey, but just touching the tip of the wires. After connecting every wire to the Makey-Makey, there was one wire left, and that was the yellow wire. We took the yellow wire and attached it to the Earth section. Because 2 wires were able to transfer electricity to each other, when we made the metal tips of 2 wires touch, they made a sound on the piano. But that's constantly holding the key down, and if it's constantly holding the key down, I can only make one sound! I thought. I told my teammates what I thought.
    "At least it's a start..." Hwan, my teammate said.
    My other teammate, Ivan, began messing around, connecting all the wires together, trying to find out a way to pass the electricity from one wire to the other, making the piano on the computer sound. Then it worked. But how? Then we realised. Water is a good conductor of electricity, and our body is composed of mostly water, which meant that our body was the thing that was transferring the electricity to the other clip to make a sound!
    "Congratulations," Mr. Herbert, my homeroom teacher said. He walked up to the front of the class and grabbed an orange basket with holes. The basket was filled with vegetables and other things. "Sort out the things in here that conduct electricity, and the ones that don't. Because we knew that things with water conducted electricity, we were able to sort it out fast.
    Next, we connected clips to the objects, and touched the objects to make sounds on the computer. I managed to play the really good sounding band song we are currently playing - we are going to be playing it at the concert.
    After coming back from our 5 minute break (for us to go to the toilet and talk to our friends), Mr. Herbert showed us things that he called energy sticks. When he touched both ends of the energy sticks, they would light up because the energy was going through your body. In other words, you were completing the circuits. I thought that even if the whole class held hands, the sticks would light up.
    When we all held hands together, the energy sticks lit up. YES! I was correct! We did the same thing with 2 sticks, and the 2 energy sticks lit up also!
    Throughout this lesson, I learned a lot of valuable things. It never came to my mind that energy could flow through my body, but now I know that my little body is capable to doing many things!