Jungle Adventure Obstacle Course - Day 1 - Week 3 (Mark Day School)
We’re off to a great start for this week of Tinkering School Summer Camp! Our first day is a busy one… we introduce our goals for the week and brainstorm group agreements that help us treat each other well and keep each other safe while working.
We also from time to time introduce new vocabulary. These words may have their origins in woodworking, physics, design, or social and emotional learning.
We always start the week with Tool Training. We focus on three main tools: cordless drills, clamps, and chop saw. Even though we will likely introduce additional tools later, these are the mainstay of our camp. Our adult collaborators teach rotations where we cover the purpose of each tool, the safety protocols to follow, a demonstration of proper use, and hands-on practice.
During tool training, we also begin to teach about the value of paying attention to our senses when working with tools and materials. For example, when a driver bit makes a grinding sound while putting a screw into wood, it’s starting to strip the screw. Tinkerers learn to get up on their knees or stand to provide more pressure on the top of the drill to prevent that from happening. Or when tightening a drill bit in a drill “chuck,” hearing a click indicates that it’s starting to tighten enough but still requires an additional hand crank to fully tighten. There’s so much to learn! We haven’t even talked about the sounds wood can make and what that can tell us… that’s for tomorrow’s demonstration.
After a nice break playing at the park and having lunch and getting to know each other, it was time for… drumroll… the theme reveal:
David gave the theme context: “We’ve discovered a secret hidden jungle valley between two mountains. There’s a river that we have to cross, filled with crocodiles, an entrance mountain with a waterfall that we will have to descend, and an exit mountain with jungle vines that we will have to climb.”
There’s so much to figure out in order to build that entire scene! We start with a design session where each tinkerer sketches their ideas and then we start to look for common elements as we come up with our build plans.
What will the angle be for our mountain side? How wide should it be?
How tall should our volcano (aka exit mountain) be? Four feet? Six feet? Eight? Ten?
Click through the gallery below for more photos from today. Visit our Flickr page for many more photos from throughout the week.
