class

While this isn’t the best photo, it gives you a sense of the basic elements of this project, before it was festooned with colorful pompoms. We would have preferred to use low-heat hot glue guns, but we had a power outage to contend with, so we used battery powered glue guns and they can get hot and burn little fingers. So an adult held the headband carefully and the student did the gluing. Our goal is to have the student participate fully from start to finish.

Step 1 was to glue the LEDs in place with all the anodes facing the same direction so they could be wired in parallel easily. We used a combination of blue, green, white and blinking LEDs, but learned that red and yellow LEDs are lower voltage and will make the other colors not function, so we didn’t use those.

If you look closely, you’ll see a black battery holder on the lower left end of the headband. That’s our power source. Two copper wires are soldered onto the battery holder. Students then wrapped the copper wire around the legs of the LEDs and once we confirmed that each circuit was wired properly (they all got it the first time – yay!) we encased the connections in hot glue. That’s what’s happening above.