🔌 Electricity and gadgets

An electric circuit is a complete loop that electricity can flow around, like a racetrack for tiny charges. If the loop is joined all the way from a battery, through a wire, to a bulb and back, the bulb lights up. Break the loop anywhere, and the flow stops instantly.

A battery holds energy inside as chemicals, ready and waiting. When you connect it into a circuit, those chemicals react and push electricity out through the wires to do a job, like lighting a bulb. Once the chemicals are used up, the battery goes flat, and some kinds can be filled up again by recharging.

An electric motor uses electricity and magnets to make something turn. When electricity flows through a coil of wire, the coil becomes a magnet, and it is pushed and pulled by other magnets so it spins around. That spinning can turn wheels, fans, and the blades inside many machines.

A screen is covered in a grid of millions of tiny dots called pixels, each able to glow red, green or blue. By mixing those three colours at different brightnesses, each dot can show almost any colour. Together, all the dots build up the picture you see, and they change many times a second to make it move.