Snap Circuits Teacher Guide for SC 100/300/500/750

Unless a child has a burning interest in electricity, I'm guessing that they're not going to pore over the Snap Circuits experiment guides and really learn why a project works before they assemble it. When the excitement wears off, however, they may be interested to learn more about electricity. Or maybe you may just want to incorporate that Snap Circuits set in with what you're studying in physics. To make it easier to do both of those things, there are two Student Guides and a comprehensive Teacher Guide available for the core Snap Circuits sets. The student guides are full-color and present a variety of electricity topics based on the projects and parts included in that particular kit. For example, the Student Guide for the 100-Experiment Snap Circuits set includes four chapters: Basic Components & Circuits, Motors & Electricity, Resistance, and Electronic Sound and Integrated Circuits. Each chapter is made up of color-coded boxes of text. Core information is blue, experiments (which reference the experiments in the Snap Circuit set's activity guide) are green, yellow is for introducing electronics parts, orange is for advanced material, and brown is for additional/background material. Each chapter ends with "quick quiz" assignments, practice problems, and a bulleted summary of important concepts. The end of the guide holds definitions for electrical terms and components. Although originally there was one student guide per kit, the manufacturer has combined the student guides for the 300-Experiment kit and up, so now there is a 100 Experiment Guide and a 300/500/750 Experiment Guide. All in all, the guides do a great job of "filling in the gaps" informationally, while using the Snap Circuits set as a basis. There is only one Teacher Guide, which covers all of the Snap Circuits sets. The Teacher Guide holds some parent/teacher information, a table of contents for each of the Student Guides, reproducible quizzes for each Student Guide, and answers for the quizzes. What a great and easy-to-use resource to delve a little bit deeper into those electricity concepts! - Jess

These easy-to-use circuit kits are composed of over 30 easy to snap "blocks" of all necessary electronic components, similar to those used in Switch On!. An impressive number of projects can be made using these parts, including an electric light, a sound activated switch, lamp and fan, two-speed fan, laser "gun." police siren, clap sounds, blinking double flashlight, motor sounds, strobe lights, motor-controlled lamp, lamp/speaker/fan in parallel, pencil alarm, touch motor, bomb sound, simple water alarm, and many, many more projects and games. Each project is listed in the booklet, and featured in a half-page layout which includes a full-color diagram of the finished setup, objective, and directions. The parts are all labeled on the diagram, making it easy to set up the project, and the directions include an explanation of how the circuit works, so maybe after the thrill of creating their own laser "gun" or water alarm wears off, they'll come back and actually figure out how it works. A fairly detailed orientation to the parts in the kit and their functions, safety guidelines, parts checklist and a troubleshooting guide are all included at the beginning, so students can complete the projects safely - and get a lot more from the kit than just "making cool stuff." Looking back from beyond college, I definitely recommend any child looking to the science route in college to play around a bit with one of these kits - it honestly does make understanding circuits and charges at the college level a little easier. This is definitely too fun to be "science!" A Dr. Toy 100 Best Children's Products Winner. - Jess