Halloween Pumpkins With Squishy Circuits

Can you believe it’s only two months until Halloween?  This was a really fun Halloween pumpkin craft that used science for extra cool factor. Halloween Pumpkins With Squishy Circuits!

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links

While out shopping the other day I found an orange pool noodle in the summer clearance section. After overcoming a brief moment of panic as I realized summer was ending soon, I decided the orange pool noodle was screaming to be turned into a Halloween craft.

The Circuit Bugs we made last week were a lot of fun and I think it was a great way to really bring the Arts into STEAM work. I wanted to create something for Halloween that used the same type of concepts and came up with the idea of these super cute little pumpkins.

Here’s how we did it:

Using scissors I cut the pool noodle into sections.

Then very carefully I carved the faces using a box cutter style knife. Pool noodles are extremely hard to carve, and all the carving should be done by an adult only, but I think we still ended up with some cute “pumpkin carvings”. For the stalk we used a rolled up piece of green card stock.

We decided to try making squishy circuits to light the pumpkins.

First I had to make the conductive dough and insulating dough. I used the recipes from the University of St. Thomas where they created Squishy Circuits.

Their recipe makes a LOT of dough! We will be making lots of squishy circuits over the next few weeks! If you have any cool ideas for us please leave them in the comments.

Then I made my squishy circuit sandwich by putting a layer of insulating dough between two layers of conductive dough. Once I had my sandwich I attached a 9 volt battery with the leads going into separate layers of conductive dough.

After that we just pushed our LED Lights into the conductive dough by stretching the legs out so the ends each went into a different side. If it doesn’t work, turn the bulb around or wiggle around the battery leads and make sure they have a good connection in the dough.

Once we had light we just put it inside of our pool noodle lanterns and voila! Glowing Halloween Lanterns!

The nice thing with this design is that I can quickly disconnect the battery and reattach on Halloween night so we have our glowing decoration. One caution though, the dough does dry out very quickly. It should be stored in an air tight container between uses, but the great people at the University of St. Thomas say it should be good for a month if stored properly.

Happy Halloween STEAM Crafting!