Buzzer game

You've probably all seen this type of game before, where you have to guide a metal ring over a metal wire course without the ring touching the wire. It's nothing more than a buzzer, some batteries and perhaps a light/LED, but it's a great way to teach kids some basics about electricity and electronics.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of building 35 of these buzzer games. I assembled the battery holder, buzzer, an LED and resistor and some wires.

Each "kit" had a piece of steel wire about 4 feet / 120cm in length with some small loops on both ends for easy mounting. A second straight piece of about 10 inch / 25 cm in length soldered to the negative wire of the battery holder (and some extra wire in between for extra length). And the buzzer/led/resistor wired to the battery holder, with a bit of bare copper wire to connect it to the steel wire.

Needless to say, I spent roughly 8 hours preparing everything. All the kids needed to do was bend the long steel wire into whatever shape they would think would work, and mount it on a piece of wood using two screws. Then they'd have to mount the battery holder with another screw, and connect loose piece of copper wire to their now very oddly shaped steel wire. Lastly they had to bend the small piece of steel wire. Doesn't sound like much work, but don't underestimate how much time kids aged 8 to 10 need for even the most trivial tasks...

Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of their creations, but here's the example I prepared myself:

In hindsight, I wouldn't solder everything. Instead you're better off just using a bunch of plastic terminal connectors. Don't connect everything with really thing copper wire, it breaks easily. And of course, don't use solid core copper wire but stranded.

I made another one, which is slightly larger:

It has a 12V LED strip on the base, is made of much thicker steel wire and is powered using a 3 cell lithium polymer battery from my RC parts box. There's a piezo buzzer soldered onto the power rails of the LED strip. I'd like to expand on this a bit further, add a bit of logic. The LED strip and buzzer should be latched, meaning they don't turn off as soon as you break contact. They also shouldn't remain on continuously when there's contact; that's just too annoying. I'd also like to add a few red and green strips and add "lives" to the game: you'd start with three lives, and lose one each time you make contact. After the last life is lost the red strip lights up indicating game over. An ATtiny, a few transistors, some resistors and a voltage regulator are probably all that's needed to build this.