Students are introduced to the concepts of static electricity at a school level and an under-graduate level. In this paper, we present an inexpensive and portable device that can be used to study the static electricity and verify polarity of the electric charge on materials in a triboelectric series. This device is developed at the Science Laboratory, Nehru Planetarium (Mumbai), India. It has wide applications as an educational tool to teach the fundamental concepts of electrostatics in a simpler way.