Shih Chieh Huang’s “Organic concept” installation
Visiting artist Shih Chieh Haung (”CJ”) spent last week here at the Exploratorium, researching possible collaborations, sharing his wonderful work with the staff, and generally having a good time. On his last day, we convinced him to make one of his “organic concept” installations on the museum floor. These are incredibly evocative and fun, but the execution is surprisingly simple!
All we needed to make it happen were a box fan, some painter’s tarp (which is a really thin, long sheet of plastic), and a couple of bungee cords. One end of the tarp roll gets secured over the box fan, then the fan is turned on, and the ends of the tarp are knotted together at regular intervals. The organic shape that results was an amazing draw, and it came together in less than 20 minutes! Of course visitors (especially children) attacked it immediately, but it was also really nice to see the Exploratorium staff come out of their hiding holes and start playing with it as well.
Another great advantage of this construction is the the inevitable holes and ruptures that happen can be immediately repaired by simply tying another knot! So, what we thought would last only a few minutes, ended up providing a couple of hours of solid enjoyment and wonder to many people.
Chain reaction videos: explainer style!
As promised, here are two videos showing the contraptions built by the explainers during their training with us. Cool stuff!
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:
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.
