My make Part 1: what's a resistor

I have now started investigating my own Make. I decided to buy an Arduino Starter kit from Elegoo . The reason for this is because the area of difficulty I have most with my subject is teaching the simplification of Boolean Algebra expressions. After my first make involving circuit boards, I am interested in seeing if I can create a simplify complex circuits using the Arduino and breadboard to help both my knowledge and the knowledge of my students.

I am going to go through the instruction manual, project by project. But the first thing I have learnt is what a resistor does, which I never knew before.

Basically, resistors come in many sizes of Ohm, from 1 to 1 megaOhm (roughly a million Ohms). I did a series of experiments using different resistors to power a red LED to show the lower the Ohm resistance in the resistor, the brighter the light will be:

Here I'm using very low resistance and the light is very bright.

But in this photo, I am using a resistor with more resistance and the light is not as bright.

Without the resistor, the power going to the LED would probably burn out the LED and destroy it.

After this I experimented with a RGB LED, which can generate any light colour. To do this I had to program the Arduino to change the shades of red, blue and green lights:

Initial impressions: The breadboard is very fiddly to use and it can be difficult to get the pins into it. My eyesight also struggles with the small writing and holes and I think I will need to use a bright lamp to see everything more clearly.