All week long we are celebrating STEAM. STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics. We will be doing activities that are going to excite the little inventor in your house. Today we are going to continue making some Halloween decorations for the house. My kids have really enjoyed the 4th of July and Birthday Party projects so I decided to attempt a Halloween craft. This time we are going to harness a little of the creepy factor and combine it with STEAM to make spiders with light up eyes on a web. We made the web yesterday, so today we are focusing on the spider. This spiders uses paper circuits to for lit up eyes. I have provided affiliate links for your convenience. You can read my full disclosure here.

I want to start with some creepy crawly fun facts about spiders:

all spiders are predators
most spiders are venomous
spiders can’t digest solid food
not all spiders make webs.

You can get more information about spiders here.

WARNING: We will be using ” button” batteries which can be extremely dangerous when handled incorrectly. This project requires constant ADULT SUPERVISION.

Materials:

C 2032 Batteries (1 for each spider)
Copper Tape
LED Diodes
Tape
Cardstock
School Glue
Tissue Paper
Binder Clip (medium worked best for us)
Burlap Canvas (optional mounting for finished product)

We are going to create a circuit with copper tape, battery, and LED lights. Are you getting stoked? My kids were willing to stick with the more artistic craft yesterday (although begrudgingly) to be able to make the spider today. Since we are using two LED Lights we are going to create a parallel circuit. I made this project much more complicated than necessary. I will just be starting with the projects in the book from now on. This is inspired from the project in the STEAM Kids book you see here.

Make SPIDERS with Light Up Eyes

We are putting our spider on our web so we will size accordingly. You can make whatever size spider that you want, but remember that you will be putting the circuit on it. We are using cardstock and tissue paper to create a hairy spider with some dimension.

1. Use a couple of circular containers to create the outline for the cephalothorax and abdomen.
2. Create a tab large enough to cover the battery.
3. Cut out the spider and attached tab.
4. Create dimension in the spiders by using tissue paper. Just crumple the paper and lay on glue that is spread around the surface. Fill in gaps as needed.
5. Let the spiders dry completely before building the circuit.
6. Make small hole punch for LED diodes to go through for eyes.

You are left with this. Notice the tab at the bottom. That will be important for the battery.

Things I wish I had known:

Make the spider large enough to run the circuit in the back. I wished our spiders were a little larger once I realized we would need to run a parallel circuit.
Draw the circuit in lightly with a pencil so that you aren’t trying to freehand with the copper tape.
Pull the back off the copper tape a little at a time because this will prevent the tape from getting damaged.
If you get the cheaper kind of copper tape that doesn’t have conductive adhesive you need to make sure that the conductive side is touching throughout the circuit so that it will conduct the charge. This means that you have to do some origami in the corners, but you will get the hang of it.
Make a model of the circuit on a plain index card first.

BUILD THE CIRCUIT

You can get the steps to build a basic circuit in STEAM Kids. (ebook or print)
We had to build a parallel circuit because we were using two eyes

TROUBLESHOOTING

Flip over the battery
Is the copper tape continuous and not damaged?
Are the leads in close enough contact with the tape? You can usually gently press the tape to see if it works.
Is the battery touching the copper tape on both sides?

Finishing TOUCHES

Add the legs. We used long legs that we could bend over the binder clip to help hide it. It is up to you. ( We attached the legs using glue dots)
We added our spiders to our webs we made previously and mounted them on the burlap canvas we used at 4th of July

For this project we created a parallel circuit. The reason I had to use a parallel circuit was because I used 2 LED lights and only one battery. In STEAM Kids, they suggest putting the leads for the LED light under the tape, but the leads have to touch the conductive part of the tape. I wound up taping them on to the non-adhesive surface. It seemed to work just fine.

This was a great project and I learned a ton. I had no idea that this type of thing was possible or so affordable. I see many of these projects in our future. The kids immediately began brainstorming. This is only one example of the type of project that you can find in STEAM Kids. We will be celebrating STEAM all week here at The Learning Hypothesis.