A magnet, a wire, and a multimeter.

Yesterday we started much simpler than our build list suggests. Before we connect anything — before switches, before breaking and repairing a circuit, before making things move — we want to build intuition about what electricity actually is.

We pulled the magnet, wire, and multimeter experiment from The Magic School Bus and tried it on the kitchen table. Moving a magnet near a coil of wire made the needle on the multimeter twitch. No battery, no plug — just motion turning into a reading we could see.

It raised more questions than it answered, which felt right. We now have something concrete to point at when we talk about current and voltage, and a reason to care about circuits before we start building them.