Flying Dragons - Week 2

Hear ye, hear ye it is time to announce this session’s design challenge extravaganza! Aha - what is that? Do you hear a distant roar, a plume of smoke! Why yes!! It’s a dragon!

This session of the after school Tinkering program we are building dragons you can ride on, in and under! After we discovered that it was indeed Emma and not a real dragon that was soaring through our shop, we discussed in further detail the nature of our design challenge. Not only are we building dragons that can hold a human and fly on a cable that spans the length of the school, each dragon also need to be able to grab and release an egg mid-flight.

We split into three groups, dragons you can ride on, dragons you can ride in and dragons you can ride under and set to work designing our dragons. Each student began by making their own design, then doing a gallery walk of their team’s drawings and presenting each of their ideas to their group.

Peter, Nicholas and Skylan draw individual designs in the dragons you ride in group.

The tinkerers in the dragons you ride under group discuss their ideas and brainstorm with their teammates.

Clay presents his idea to his team in the dragons you ride in group.

Next we incorporated all of the ideas into a single design and got to work. We love to let our ideas go WILD while designing, and once our imaginations to get going, we ground our ideas by investigating what our material and size constraints are.

Peter and Skylan take measurements for their dragon’s wings.

And August uses the jig saw.

We had a great day full of fun, creativity and serendipity - Olivia excitedly shows her school mascot’s shirt, which she wore before knowing our design challenge was dragons! A true tinkering miracle. See you all next week!