I want to make electricity with my students...

Sorry! The title just sounded a wee bit dirty!

HAHAHA! That I already have plenty of with them! They are all hormones….

A small light bulb from a flashlight. If you can’t get the bulb to light up you could use a multimeter to prove that you are creating a current.

Even a small bulb will require quite a bit of electron flow to light. Try a LED (light emmiting diode) instead. johnpowell is also correct, a voltmeter with a low voltage scale across the load, or a milliammeter in series with the load, will also indicate the flow.

Glad to hear you are trying to make the result visual, it’s so much more effective.

Yeah, you probably won’t get much if they spin it by hand. Sticking the magnet in a cordless drill should help produce more juice. Then you could use the drill to spin the magnet.

I would imagine that you are going to have some kind of structure to hold things in place. This would be hard to do without some kind of jig to hold the wire and magnet in alignment.

Here’s an idea: attach the students. In my science class in 8th grade, we all held hands in a big circle to complete a circuit, then someone cranked the generator (the toughest kids were closest to the generator). You can definitely feel the tingling sensation and it’s not the least bit dangerous. Plus it’s a lot more hands-on, the whole class gets in on it, and it’s more interesting than watching a lightbulb flicker.

@MisterBlueSky85: I second that one. We did that with one of those static electricity domes (the one with the friction belt) of which the name escapes me…

@richardhenry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_de_Graaff_generator

@jp: That’s the one. :) Man, that was years ago.