It's Raining Cats and Dogs! - Session 3 - Day 1: A Storm is Brewing
A storm is brewing at Tinkering School. The forecast calls for a heavy shower of cats and dogs on Friday afternoon at around 2:15pm! We don't actually know exactly what that means yet, but we'll be trying our best to make it rain small mammals, possibly made of wood.
We started the day out by getting to know each other and creating some agreements about how to treat each other and the space to be safe and have fun.
After laying our social groundwork, we started right into tool training! Under the tutelage of Evan, Nik, and Jeff, the tinkerers started out on the path to mastering the use of drills and clamps.
A quick break at the park up the street got us back into gear for the afternoon.
After lunch, we got into our two project groups: one team is going to make it rain cats and dogs by dropping them from the ceiling (no animals will be harmed in the making of this project); the other team will be building shelter to protect us from the larger than usual projectile mammal precipitation. A short design session for each group helped the teams determine the first steps in their projects, and we got right to work after that.
As it turns out, building cats and dogs from wood is challenging since they don't naturally have straight lines in them. The cats and dogs team subdivided into two smaller teams, one to prototype a dog, and one to prototype a cat. With some solid teamwork and a bit of inspiration, we made good progress toward overcoming this challenge.
The shelter team seems to have had a clear vision from the start, since they already created a rather large base frame for the shelter. Hopefully they can solve all the structural engineering challenges so that their shelter can withstand a rain of wooden cats and dogs falling from the ceiling.
