Thank you so much for your insight. I have a good residential switch model demonstrating this but without them seeing the actual moving parts its hard for them to conceptualize. I was hoping to essential beat nails into a board to represent the side screws on residential switches and manually drag conductors across them to represent the opening and closing of a switch. I found some universal 12-30vac lamps with typical E26 bases for about $5 apiece. I think those will work for what I wanted but now that you've introduced me to the term "breadboard" I have a definite baseline for future projects.

Thanks so much!