nairn part 1

I have the documentation of this workshop (2.5 hours) mostly on the school video camera... so I'm waiting on the footage from them. Since there was only one of me, it was hard to get photos as well as try to video the kids explaining their ideas. So for now, I'll just put up what I have and try to explain until I can get stills from the videos (as well as the videos themselves).

Group *
Group *'s finished product
This group was a group of three mixed boy/girl... two boys, one girl. Twelve years old. Their idea was an ice skating penguin. They really had trouble trying to get it to stand upright, and in the end, it just collapsed. When asked what they would do differently next time they replied "focus more on getting it to work and then work on getting it to look nice." They worked well together as a group, trying to split up tasks between them. Penguin was attached to the motor, and the motor was on top of this plastic cup with a hole in it. In the end, it was just too much weight for the strength of the plastic cup.

Group &
Group & (pt 2)
This was a group of four mixed boy/girl... two and two. Again, age twelve. I don't have a proper photo of this finished as of yet. But it's a cow leaping over a moon with a shooting star chasing it. There's the star and the cow there. They were quite clever in how to get this to stand up ... kind of like a tri-fold poster presentation thing. they attached the moon directly to the motor to make it spin. Complete with stars and a background. They finished right on time, but I feel they didn't really push themselves as far as the mecahnism went. But they came up with good structural solutions for the shooting star (they had problems with it spinning around the wrong way) as well as the motor mount.


Group ^
This was a group of four boys who made a hero/villain fighting while flying over Hollywood. That's a palm tree there. Again, this group attached the people directly to the motor. Instead of mechanism problems (i.e. not using a mechanism other than the motor spinning), they had really hard structural problems. As in, they had trouble figuring out how to hold things in place. So, although maybe not as mechanically sophisticated as one might've hoped, they figured out a bit of structures. And they came up with a particularly quick/clever solution (thought not a good long-term one) of holding the motor in place with a rubber band.

Group %
This was a group of four girls who made a boat with a baby and a shark swimming around the boat with a person who had fallen in the water. Quite a complex story, there. Shark directly attached to motor. They had trouble with the stand for the boat (that you see there), but after asking them a few questions, they came up with the idea to give it some supports coming down from the top to the corners (making triangles to help keep it upright). This group worked exceptionally well as a team, dividing up tasks so that everyone was working all the time and it all came together at the end.

And then there's one more team that I don't have any photo of. Nor do I really remember right off hand what they worked on (this is what I get for waiting a few days to write this up... but I haven't had any spare time to do so and now I'm just staying up way too late to get this done before I forget). But this team of four boys had so much trouble. They wanted to do everything! And in the end, they really didn't have anything that worked. They were the only team, though, that tried to make a mechanism, of sorts. But they got distracted by the super hero/villain team. And they got discouraged by not knowing the answers right off hand, though I did my best to encourage them and talk them through questions.