I started this as my Teenager Tuesday newsletter idea – and it got to long I decided a blog post was in order!

I want to share with you a cool new type of paint – and some project ideas for using it.

Conductive ink is a type of ink that conducts electricity. So it lets you draw a circuit that you would normally need a wire for. It is available in paint or ink pen type formats from several places including here and here on Amazon.com (or here and here if you are in the UK!)

What a great opportunity it gives us for homeschooling science and electronics projects! An educational project that is also fun!

I went searching for ideas  for things we could use it for, and this is what I came up with 🙂

Cards and Pictures

Because it is just paint – it is easy to make cards and pictures with it. Any lines will carry an electric current, so you can use it to add lights and sound.

 

There is a good tutorial here. One of the problems is being able to turn the light on and off – Geekmom has a good solution.

Idea –

Print out some mazes and attach a battery at one end and an LED bulb at the other. Get the children to find their way through the maze and complete the circuit between the two.

 

Make Music

You can use a MaKey MaKey to make a touch sensitive musical poster. Like this:

 

There is a tutorial on how to do this here and some more ideas on the MaKeyMaKey website.

For more ‘touch’ projects check out Bare Conductive’s tutorials which uses their Touch Board.

You could also try taking this a step further and make interactive sound based books. How about an interactive board book for younger children – or get your teenagers to design a book that will say each word aloud as it is touched. There is an example here.

 Idea

Conductive Paint can be applied to textiles as well as paper. Can your children design an e-textile? Try a T-shirt or quilt that lights up or makes sound. How about gloves that make music from the finger tips? Or finger puppets flashing eyes. What can you invent?

NB- The paint is water soluble so washing the clothes will remove the paint.

 

 Raspberry Pi Projects

Electric paint will make your raspberry pi projects even easier – no wires or soldering required.

 

I hope you enjoying playing with these ideas and seeing what you invent. If you would like more inspiration, I have a whole page of homeschooling ideas here.