An Alarming Discovery

My dog, Odin, is constantly getting into things he shouldn't. It's a real problem at our house. I asked our after school tinkering kids if they thought we might be able to design an alarm system to solve my problem. Of course, they were intrigued.  We dug right in, reminding ourselves of all we now knew about circuits.

First we designed our systems. Graph paper and clipboards make the entire design process much more official.

Then we all set to work:

We made some prototypes:

We tested our ideas...

....and finally, trapped the parents as they opened the door at pickup time.

We also made more videos explaining how our systems worked.  This was the culmination of our three-series after school tinkering program focused on circuitry. We began by learning about circuits, we designed and made bristle bots, and finally designed an alarm system to solve a problem. By the end of our series, the kids were completing the entire NGSS engineering cycle.  

In case your curious...my dog is still getting in to trouble.

Materials:

Buzzers

Old foam core museum labels

Wire

Batteries

Conductive materials including foil, tacks, binder clips

Electrical tape, duct tape

Wire cutters & strippers

Scissors

Markers