Women also work with clay to produce pottery, using improved and stabilized clay kilns, and they also use kaolin to make paint in rural areas.

And so we spent a summer looking at different Play Doh recipes.

Certain kind of molecules like to associate with the clay. For example, in this case, RNA, shown in red this is a relative of DNA, it's an informational molecule it can come along and it starts to associate with the surface of this clay.

So if I take this salt dough, again, it's like the play dough you probably made as kids, and I plug it in it's a two lead battery pack, simple battery pack, you can buy them at Radio Shack and pretty much anywhere else we can actually then light things up.

If I place that between, now all the dough is touching, but if I stick that light back in, I have light.

A marble is a small spherical toy usually made from glass, clay, steel, plastic or agate.

And there are all kinds of play clay for finger dexterity, word games for reading success, large motor play, small motor play. I feel like I could devote my life to figuring out what to play with my kids.

In a zippy demo at TED U, AnnMarie Thomas shows how two different kinds of homemade play dough can be used to demonstrate electrical properties by lighting up LEDs, spinning motors, and turning little kids into circuit designers.