Session D - Day 1 - Little Hands and Big Ideas
It's a new week! All of us here at Tinkering School are so excited! We've got an awesome project set up for these tinkerers, but... you'll have to wait till tomorrow to find out what it is!
Sunday afternoons mean making new friends, learning the lay of the land, tool training, and a communication game after dinner!
Our tinkerers couldn't wait to get to their yurts (Waterbenders, Earthbenders, and Airbenders!) and set up for a fun week of camp! After all, the less time you spend on set up, the more time you have to build!
Nicky just checked in and he's ready to build already!
So he does! He and Milo, some of the first to arrive, start working on a boat! They were especially concerned about making it watertight, so they decided to have a cardboard layer, then a pleather one, then finally a whole lot of tape!
It works! It floats away for a second, but the tinkerers figure out a way to get it back from across the deep creek... a good ol' stick!
Reed enjoys a slice of watermelon, a positive way to start out his camp experience! It's his first year and he's super excited!
Let's train! Henry experiments with different drill bits, and the uses for them all! (This one is great if you're putting a bolt in something, as he told me.)
X marks the spot! And as Milo later found out, this is in fact not the strongest way to clamp an x, "you need supports of some sort so it doesn't move!"
During a lovely dinner of lasagna, the tinkerers answered questions about themselves before a communication exercise!
Its the Alien Game! Our own dear collaborator, Kevin, is actually... an alien!!! And one who doesn't speak any english. So our tinkerers must figure out a way to communicate various tasks to her (bring a collaborator a pink marker, take a shoe from milo, etc.) without using any words of any kind!
Divya and her group went and tried their strategy on Kevin. It went great! Their goal was to get her to take Milo's shoe. They got this across to the alien by a lot of gesturing and recreating what they wanted her to do with their own group members!
A Portrait of a Tinkerer: Arielle, with her goal for the Alien Game
This was a successful day of building communication skills and learning how to operate new tools safely and efficiently! The campers are absolutely dying to know their project for the week, so we're off to bed to make the night go by fast!