Posted on 03 November 2010 at 12:11h

last week I visited the local toy shop to buy some play dough and was interested to find a new version called idough, obviously cashing in on the iphone/ipod generation, well it worked on me and I bought 12 pots. Its actually just the same as play dough, squashy stuff made of oil flour with a strong salty taste. the high salt content gives it a measureable resistance so it can be used for electrical experiments. I set about designing a DCP practical using the dough but found that the resistance jumped all over the place. The best results were achieved by squashing a sample between the plates of a variable gap capacitor which hasn't been used since capacitance came off the syllabus (ok I know its back on  now). The experiment worked quite well but the results were not as expected. Since my students might be reading this part of the website i'm not going to reveal all here's the worksheet.