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This is an illustration from one of my games: The Sorceress of Circuits: A Steampunk Electricity Adventure! It’s an interactive story that you read through, making story choices and solving puzzles while you learn the physics of electricity. I designed it for kids ages 10-12, but it would be a great introduction to the concepts for anyone who’s interested (as long as you’re up for a fun, slightly silly story aimed at kids 😊) I put a ton of thought into the way I designed this game. I’ve been tutoring physics for 20 years, and before that I did my master’s thesis on how people learn and reason about physics. I’ve done many deep-dives into the research on physics learning and worked with the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington. I also have a physics degree with honors. I love electricity. I’ve always found it fascinating, and wow has it changed our lives! It can be tough when you’re first learning about it, though, because there are all these new terms for abstract concepts like ‘voltage’, and there are totally non-intuitive things that crop up like how adding more lightbulbs to a circuit can actually decrease the total resistance, depending on how you do it. So, in this story, I introduce these concepts the way I do with my students: one at a time and with fun, meaningful practice of each concept before we go on to the next thing. We start by defending a castle from an invading robot army by launching charged particles at them! Then, we help Gerald—the perennially terrified tinkerbug—fix the castle’s defense systems by learning about conductors and insulators. From there, we’ll repair a steampunk-style airship and go break into the dreaded Professor Watt’s castle to rescue the sorceress! (Will you sneak around the back or knock on his front door???) I also include a lot of real-world details, like lemon and potato batteries and pickle lightbulbs. Partly because I think it’s funny and memorable, but mostly because these are real-world ways to see how voltage is produced. (The first one was called a voltaic pile and was a lot like the lemon batteries you can make in your kitchen.) This is incredibly important because, while lithium-ion batteries are awesome, most of us don’t have much of an intuitive sense of what lithium is like or how redox reactions work, so it sounds about as real as a flux capacitor 😊 (I mean, flux and capacitors are both real things, too, but the flux capacitor is a joke from the movie Back to the Future . . . since I’m old now, I feel I’d better clarify . . .) I want these concepts to feel real, tangible, and personal. I don’t just give a bunch of facts. I don’t present a concept until there’s a story reason that it’s needed. I really believe that learning is inherently extremely fun, and my goal with these games is to make it that way. A lot of reviewers of my books and games have said that they were so caught up in the stories that they learned without even realizing it, and that makes me so happy every time I see it, because that’s exactly what I’m going for. Because we learn things without trying all the time, and I want it to be that fun and effortless for something as important as electricity, too! You can try out a demo of the game on my website as well as read more about my other books, like the Fairy Tale Physics series. Thanks for reading! Sarah