Tinkering Takes Practice

After nearly three months of open-ended tinkering sessions, I think we've finally got this down. Today was another full house, we had 21 kids come to the workshop & for the first time, I didn't have to help anyone to find something to work on; they all got busy right away.

We had a lot of 5th graders today & since we just finished up exploring with circuits during their class visit, they went right to our circuit section & started tinkering with motors. One kid took a train & hooked it up with a motor and battery to make it go, a couple others were working on making cars out of wood & bottle cap wheels with motors and lights attached; they were all very creative. I could tell that the craft of making wheels (bottle caps, hot glued to either end of a stick, with a straw covering the middle of the dowel to make the wheels spin freely) has caught on and was the basis for lots of projects today. Lots of vehicles were made, a very cool looking toy made from colorful bottle caps, nails and rubber bands, a few flying machines, some craft stick art & probably more I didn't see.

Some kids made colorful cards with dyed shaving cream & tooth pics and two of our littlest tinkerers were fixated on propping up train tracks and setting up a long line of blocks so that when the train derailed, it would hit the blocks and cause a domino effect to hit a pyramid of red legos - it looked like a super cool Rube Goldberg machine in the making!

Here is a picture from last week's pond scum imaging day. In addition to snapping pics of pond scum, some kids found flowers and other things around outside to look at under the microscope and snap up close photo art. I like this one Sadie took: