Imagine you have two magnets. Glue one magnet on an imaginary record player (or a ‘lazy susan’ turntable) and hold the other magnet in your hand. What happens when you bring your hand close to the turntable magnet and bring the north sides together?


The magnet should repel and move, and since it’s on a turntable, it will circle out of the way. Now flip your hand over so you have the south facing the turntable. Notice how the turntable magnet is attracted to yours and rotates toward your hand. Just as it reaches your hand, flip it again to reveal the north side. Now the glued turntable magnet pushes away into another circle as you flip your magnet over again to attract it back to you. Imagine if you could time this well enough to get the turntable magnet to make a complete circle over and over again… that’s how a motor works!


After you get the buzzer and the light or LED to work, try spinning a DC motor:


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Comments

6 Responses to “Wiring Up Motors”

  1. arrowmakercpi says:

    This is so cool!! I had to use a snap circuit motor and that worked so I tried adding a switch [snap circuit] and replacing the battery pack with a snap circuit battery pack so it would attach onto a snap circuit base. It worked! Then I got an idea and taped strips that were colors blue yellow red to my fan blades it mixed into brown it was so cool!!!!! [Oh by the way I used alligator clip leads for the connections like you said]

  2. Check the shopping list for this section for a direct order link at Radio Shack.

  3. Dina Galvez says:

    Hey Aurora,
    I was just wondering where did you get the motors?

  4. Wow – what a great idea! If you have a picture, I’ll post it for others to see.

  5. Lisa West says:

    We didn’t have a propeller that would fit either. We folded over duct tape and cut out propellers and pushed the motor shaft through them. Kids had a blast twisting the the duct tape propellers to see what different angles and twists would do. As always, I had as much fun and the kids. Thanks.

  6. James Hoffman says:

    We didn’t have a propeller that would fit on our motor’s shaft, so we made one by drilling a hole in the center of two tongue depressors and gluing them together at right angles. (We just used a scissors to “drill” the holes.) Then we got the idea to build our own spin art machine! We stuck our motor up through the bottom of a cardboard box and attached our tongue-depressor propeller. We used masking tape to fasten square pieces of cardstock onto the tongue depressors, squirted some poster paint onto the cardstock, and turned on our motor. Wow! Thanks for getting us started on a fun project. We love science camp!