We began by wondering how we could use conductive foam to make materials science and electronics work together. We wanted to explore how conductive foam could create resistance for a LED to light up. We used different recipes to cook foam out of agar agar bioplastic, copper powder and carbon black. We played around with the amounts to see what the end results would be. It was a fun cooking experiment. We let them chill in the cooler incubator for a night and next day we used these mediums along with wires and batteries to make a LED light up.
We learned that it is important to stick to the exact measurements for desirable outcomes, copper powder is not ideal for foam texture as the end result was quite heavy, clunky and rigid. Heavy metal powders just sink to the bottom of the liquid agar mix instead of staying suspended, so we found out that carbon black works much better because it stays light, blends smoothly, and keeps the whole structure flexible.
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