The Search for Sea Monsters - Day 4 - Week 4 (Mark Day School)
I want to start with some quotes from today, spoken by your kids — our tinkerers:
“I love putting in screws!”
“I tried to get as many jobs as possible [to build] the ship.”
“I love [clamps]. I’m gonna buy one for my birthday.”
I smiled so many times today hearing kids talking about their love of building and their enthusiasm for working with tools and tinkering in general. My question for the group at closing circle was “Now that you are a tinkerer and know how to use tools and have learned about working with wood and other materials, what will be different after camp ends?” Tinkerers spoke about knowing more uses for tools such as making an angled cut with a chop saw or using a large drill bit to make a larger hole. And even though they didn’t quite verbalize it, I know that for myself, using tools helps me see the world differently. For example, shortly after becoming a maker educator, my dishwasher stopped working. While I’d usually hire someone to come and fix it, I decided to open it up and take a look. After a few minutes, I realized that there was a wire that had come loose and I was able to re-connect it. That little bit of confidence from previous experiences and the willingness to dive in when a problem appears have served me well.
But back to the morning build… laser cut scales appeared today! The benefit of having a makerspace as your backdrop for Summer Tinkering Camp is that we have digital fabrication tools like 3D printers, a vinyl cutter, a CNC router, and a laser cutter. So David took a moment to teach a few tinkerers how to cut out shapes from old hanging file folders. This offered a nice lesson in reusability, too. And while this was a small side project, it adds such rich details to the sea monster we’re building.
What were the big moments of the day? Certainly putting the deck on the top of the ship. That required several of our young friends to operate the jigsaw to precisely follow lines drawn on plywood for a ladder cutout. Oh, and the tail getting so many spikes! And the hinged mouth of the sea monster getting pulled in several directions by ropes attached to pulleys! We also had a need for large drill bits which require on-the-spot mentoring from collaborators or junior collaborators (Abby) to help with the additional torque that those bits create.
But for me and my fellow collaborators, there are also signs that we start to notice as the week comes to a close. A kid will walk from the build area to the tool wall, grab a drill and attach a battery, walk to the materials cart and get a bucket with screws, driver bit and drill bit, and head to a section of the ship or the sea monster that needs additional support and just… drill a pilot hole and drive a screw. And then move on to the next section of wood and repeat the process. It’s a simple set of steps but the ease with which kids start to do this is a product of the practices we discuss and demonstrate each day leading up to this. These are really, for us, small magical moments. Our tinkerers are able to figure out the next step in the project and take action to see it through without needing an adult to intervene. We’re present and always ready to lend a hand but whenever we can, we like to step back and let the magic happen.
We hope you can join us tomorrow from 2:00-2:20pm for our Play/Test/Appreciate moment where we get to share everything we’ve been building this week!
Here are more photos from today:
