Whale of a Tale - Day 1 - Week 1 (Mark Day School)
We’re so happy to be back in person for Summer Tinkering Camp! Today was all about inspiration and orientation. We started to get to know each other, came up with group agreements for the week, completed tool training, and began planning our two big builds.
We introduced our camp goals: Collaborate and Make Friends, Try Harder than Usual, Build Something Bigger than Ourselves, and Make Mistakes and Learn from them.
These will inform how we work but also how we think about our experiences. We were pleased to hear one tinkerer explain that “Mistakes aren’t bad things. They are good things.” We couldn’t agree more!
After playing at the park and lunch together, we came back and revealed the theme for the week: Whale of a Tale. An unbelievable story made the news recently about a man being swallowed by a whale and surviving. We imagined trying to answer the question: what would it be like to be swallowed by a whale? And what if we had to live inside a whale? What would we find? What would we need?
We value every tinkerer’s input so we first sketch our ideas and then do a “gallery walk” to explain and appreciate each drawing, and then we get to the hard work of combining ideas and planning what to build.
Tool training ensures that all of our tinkerers get to watch a demo, learn safety rules, and practice using tools. After that, when a piece of wood needs a screw, or a clamp is needed to hold wood together, our campers are already prepared to get to work. We teach three tools: drills, clamps, and chop saw (aka mitre saw). Every chop saw cut starts with a ready call: the operator asks “Is everyone ready?” and all observers respond with a thumbs up indicating they are wearing eye and ear protection and focused on the task at hand.
Click through the gallery below for additional photos from tool training and the rest of our first day! For even more photos from throughout the week, visit our Flickr page.
