New Year Count Down! - Winter Break Camp

Today some tinkerers returned to finish what they started, with the help of some new faces!

After tool practice we visited each project: The Count-down Machine and The Celebration Machine and talked about the goals of each machine and what had been accomplished the day before.

Then the kids started brainstorming how to improve or complete each machine.

After sharing ideas and discussing possibilities the Celebration Machine decided that the large lever/catapult was too big to figure out how to make the mechanism work, so some prototyping began!

Today was a great day for Collaboration our first goal of Tinkering School and these kids worked really hard together to make several different versions of a seesaw type launcher:

Over at the Countdown Machine we were rearranging supports that were making the clock tower more wobbly than stable.

We also had to figure out how to keep the clock face from sliding off the rod and the rod from sliding out of the clock tower! Part of the team got use the drill press again, to make some giant end caps!