Mixed Up Animals - Day 3 - Week 2 (Mark Day School)

When we’re building things bigger than ourselves (one of our goals), we also want to make things stronger than ourselves. These giant creatures need to be able to fly and swim and stand and — for us — they need to be able to withstand our body weight.

So we started today off with a demo of two concepts: (1) using triangles to reinforce a joint where two pieces of wood come together and (2) an attempt to answer the question “If two screws hold wood together better than one screw… is it even better to have three screws? Four? Five? Ten?!”

As Jayson began to apply force to two pieces of wood held together with ten screws, we all curiously watched and listened (listening is a big part of tinkering because we can learn from what the wood sounds like when we’re working with it). We heard the creaking and breaking of the wood fibers and we learned that having that many screws in a piece of wood splits those fibers and weakens it. David helped us understand the difference between compression (depending on wood for strength) and sheer force (depending on screws for strength).

Wednesday is one of my favorite days in camp because it’s often the day when our wooden structures start to take on more life and also the day when we hit our stride, so to speak. We start to work less as individual tinkerers and more like a well-oiled machine with kids happily holding wood for other kids, taking turns using drills, cutting angled cuts on the chop saw, sanding plywood that might be sat upon, etc. We even have an outline of a dolphin drawn so that tomorrow we can cut it out of plywood and make a profile for our dangaroo. I understand that’s the working name for this creature that both lives under the water and jumps up and down with a baby in its pouch.

As we progress through the build, our tinkerers may find a task that requires a new tool or a new skill which we’re happy to teach. Today, a bunch of kids learned to use the jigsaw to cut out shapes or trim pieces of plywood to size.

At Summer Tinkering Camp, we work hard and we play hard. Every day, we have a nice long recess & lunch at a nearby park. It’s important to have down time, to run around, to get to know our fellow tinkerers better, and to be silly and less structured.

Click through the gallery below for more photos from today. Or visit our Flickr gallery for many, many more photos from the week.