Archive for April, 2009
Chain Reaction training
In preparation for the upcoming Maker Faire booth, in which we will be hosting a community-built chain reaction event, we had the pleasure of trying out the activity with the Exploratorium explainers. Due to their busy schedule and the need to have the museum floor staffed, we had to split the workshop in two days, with half the explainers doing the activity on one day, and the other half on the next.
In this activity, we will ask participants to build a section of a collective chain reaction; each section will then join with and trigger the next one, so that at the end of a building session, we will be able to set the contraption off at one end, and it will work its way (flawlessly, I’m sure!) to the end.
As always, the depth of thought and care that this group of educators brings to any activity they participate in shined through, both in the actual construction of the chain reaction elements, and in the discussion we had afterwards.
Now we are definitely looking forward to Maker Faire in a month!
Here are some photographs from both days:
Chain Reaction – Vergnuggets
The first chain reaction experiments. After spending some time with those setups and filming them, they became little stories with actors to me. The happy “little kicker” scoring two goals at once, the brave “jump into a tiny pool”, and a race between dark ball and silver ball.
I call them Vergnuggets – little bits of Vergnügen.
Marble elevators
In a parallel line of development, we are playing around with marbles and chain reaction elements. One of the problems that we’re constantly facing is how to work against gravity. It’s easy enough for a marble to roll down an incline, but how do you bring it back up? Here are two solutions Walter came up with.
Scratch development: telephortunes
So, in typical Learning Studio style, we hauled a wide variety of materials (switches, motors, art supplies, found objects, etc.) onto a central table, and started playing around.
So I wrote a simple program to count the number of clicks for each number dialed.
