Putting together an electrical circuit can be one of the most confusing and frustrating tasks in the whole introductory physics lab course. Circuit diagrams appear so neat, yet their real world implementations, using red and black cables with banana jacks and alligator clips, end up looking like someone's $50 perm or a badly burned spaghetti dinner. But this is the point: circuit diagrams give instructions for electrical connections; they do not show how the circuit actually looks on the lab bench. It takes practice to implement them faithfully. Consult your text for the circuit element symbols for resistors, batteries, and so on. They are also shown below.
