Welcome to PLIX Paper Circuits! Learn the basics of circuits while creating beautiful, interactive works of art!
🥰 Ages 8+ 🕐 1–1.5 Hours 👩👧👦 up to 10 Participants 🍎 1–2 Facilitators ⚡️ Low-tech Electronic
A friendly introduction to electronics, this activity is a PLIX team favorite. It's our recommended starting point for new facilitators who want to begin offering creative STEAM programming in their libraries.
Imagine
Activities can be adapted in many ways — below are some ideas to help you imagine how your activity might look like.
Remix an Idea Prompt
Lit Wearables Enhance your clothes, jewelry, or other wearables with LEDs and copper tape. Examples: Decorate your shoes with LEDs; make a light-up bracelet
Get Inspiration from the PLIX Community
by Doria Ramos, Santa Ana Public Library
This remix gives a glow up for a popular library program playing with fuse beads!
Get inspired by the art world, with this light up sculpture based on artist James Turrell’s work
by PLIX Ambassador Melissa Sprenne, Richland Library Ballentine
Create a playful and functional home decor with this paper circuits remix!
Place LEDs strategically on a printed photo to get fun and sometimes creepy effects!
by the PLIX Team
Add some pizzazz to your Valentine’s card with this punny remix!
by PLIX Ambassador Dave Fink, Michigan City Public Library
Deck yourself with a glowing fashion statement with a wearable paper circuit!
by the PLIX Team
Copper tape is hard to work with, try chenille stems / pipe cleaners!
Prepare
Gather Materials
For purchasing electronic parts, we use online shops like SparkFun or Adafruit, but there are many other options as well (e.g. local hardware stores).
Review and Print Resources
PLIX Zine
PLIX zines are a supplementary resource for patrons and librarians to refer to. Use our guide to cut and assemble them.
Love our zine, but it doesn’t fit your adaptation of the activity? Remix our zine with this Google Slides template!
Stuck? Refer to these troubleshooting tips to get unstuck.
Print and use this simple example to practice making paper circuits
Jump right into promoting your Paper Circuits workshop with this flyer template
Facilitate
This activity is designed to invite learners of all backgrounds into crafting with circuits and electronics. The materials used in this activity are intentionally low-cost and friendly to encourage participants to try new things, mess around, make mistakes, and experiment. When facilitating this activity, we encourage you to support this tinkering mindset!
Tips
🤖 Treat electronics like just another craft material.
With this activity, it’s tempting to dive deeper into electronics: how circuits work, diodes, etc. Avoid getting into the weeds or using technical jargon. Curious participants who want to learn more can look at books from your collection (such as Charles Platt's Make: Electronics) or the abundant online resources like Adafruit, SparkFun, Make:, and Instructables.
👯 Ask neighbors to troubleshoot each other's projects.
Before you take a look, ask participants to get a fresh pair of eyes on a creation. That's sometimes all one needs to discover a small error that kept an LED from lighting up. This practice encourages peer learning.
🥳 Celebrate ideas and debugging effort, not just successful circuits.
Recognize the value of the concept that the participant had in mind, and what difficulties they encountered, whether or not they resolved the issues. Process is critical in industry too. Remind your participants of how often commercially made electronics fail, and how electronics often go through long design cycles before manufacture, and that a lot of engineering is debugging.
🔦 Check in and share out frequently to reduce frustration.
Doing this throughout the making process will allow you to identify the resilience and problem-solving the participants demonstrate. Clarifying questions to ask include:
- Did you try switching out components?
- Are there any points where the circuit is overlapping where it shouldn’t? Or where the circuit is broken but it should be continuous?
- Use the troubleshooting guide to help work through other possible circuit issues.
💙 💔 Recognize resilience and the frailty of electronics.
While in this project we should think of electronic components as just another craft material, unlike with pompoms or pipe cleaners, paper circuits may fail at the end of the workshop for unknown reasons, even after a lot of debugging. Try to make sure your participants feel good about their effort: there are new rules to what works and what doesn’t, and that itself takes some time to get used to.
into creative learning facilitation with our Self-Guided Mini Course. It’ll also help you get started running your first PLIX workshop.
What We ❤️ About This Activity
🏠 Low floor, high ceiling, wide walls Making a basic paper circuit is very simple (low floor), yet the materials support increased complexity (high ceiling) and allow for a broad range of creative and aesthetic expression (wide walls).
🧩 Offers a playful approach to learning about circuits This activity is designed to invite learners of all backgrounds into tinkering with circuits and electronics.
💡 Inexpensive, familiar materials support tinkering The materials used in this activity are intentionally low-cost and friendly to encourage participants to try new things, mess around, make mistakes, and experiment.
👨👨👧👧 Encourages collaborative troubleshooting Common issues are easily investigated and resolved by a group of participants making paper circuits along-side one another—a great way to learn!
Did you come up with new prompts? Share your ideas with your peers on the PLIX Forum. Try our Remix Share-Out template if you’d like us to feature your remix!
About PLIX Paper Circuits
The PLIX Paper Circuits kit was inspired by Jie Qi’s work from the High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab. You can check out additional paper circuits components and tools designed by Jie on the Chibitronics website!
Other ways to engage with PLIX Paper Circuits
- Looking for some background music? Check out our PLIX Paper Circuits Playlist 🎶
- Read more about how the PLIX team thinks about designing creative learning activities ✨
- Share your experience running this activity on Twitter or Instagram and tag us @heyplix