Hacking STEM Lemon Battery

When life gives you lemons, make a battery. 🍋🔋💡

BeginnerProtip45 minutes650

Things used in this project

Hardware components

lemon

Alligator Clips

Zinc nail

copper rod/nail

LED (generic)

Story

How many lemons does it take to light up an LED?? Build your own lemon battery to find out!

This project is a hands-on introduction to electricity, circuits, and energy conversion. It is also a useful way to teach students of all ages about battery chemistry!

To build a lemon battery, follow these steps:

Puncture six lemons with a zinc nail and a copper rod as shown.

Orient your six lemons into 2 rows.

Connect one alligator clip to a nail and a LED at the other end of the alligator clip.

Connect another alligator clip to a copper rod of the next lemon in the row below. Then connect the other end of the alligator clip to the LED.

Connect the nail of this lemon to the copper rod of the next lemon over.

Continue connecting nails to copper rods, bridging all the lemons until you return to the first lemon you started with. Your battery is now complete and your LED will light up.

That's it! You've officially made your very own (low power) battery.

Full buildinstructions and lesson plan instructions can be found here: https://aka.ms/lemonbattery

For more open-source projects, check out the HackingSTEM activity library: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/education-workshop/activity-library.aspx