"Let's dive into it!": Learning electricity with multiple representations

Electrical circuits are difficult to understand. In this paper, we introduce Spark, a museum exhibit that enables learners to interact with multiple representations of electrical circuits at the same time. The goal is to familiarize children with fundamental concepts of electricity such as current and resistance. We tested our design with 6 parent-child dyads at a major science museum. Our study investigates how families make sense of representations at the level of circuits and at the level of electrons and ions. Our findings show a wide variety of visitor interactions with the exhibit, in particular when connecting the two representations of a circuit.