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| Building simple circuits. |
It seems like it was only yesterday that we were finishing
up our winter sessions of Inventors Club and LEGO Robotics, but here we are
already in the thick of it with spring Inventors Club, and LEGOs about to start
up again. These last two Saturdays we had
our introductory activities with the Inventors Club kids. On the first day we had fun with some of our
usual activities like simple circuit building, and safety training for the
workshop.
However, this time we had a couple new goings-on. Both the morning and afternoon groups got to
meet, hear from, and work with Rich Kronfeld, our Inventor in Residence. He joined us to talk about his new invention,
the
Raht Racer (a pedal powered electric car/bike hybrid), and help the kids work on the activities of these last two
weeks.
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| Rich explaining the Raht Racer. |
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| Prototyping a slot car track. |
Also, to coincide with having
Rich and the Raht Racer here at the museum, we worked on making our own vehicles
in the form of homemade slot car tracks, and then our own homemade slot cars to
run on those tracks.
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| Testing out a track-powered car. |
To run the cars, we connected hand crank generators to the
tracks so that, like the Raht Racer, our vehicles could also be human
powered. There were a lot of creative
solutions to the challenges of both the track and the car, and it was great to
see what neat new ideas the kids were able to come up with.
Now that we’re coming up on week three, the kids will be
starting their own individual projects to take home on May 16. A small group of volunteers, instead of
working on their own projects, will work as a group along with Rich and Bakken
staff on one large group project related to the previous activities, and Rich’s
invention. We look forward to seeing
what they create, and showcasing it both in the museum and elsewhere.
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| Safety training and workshop tour. |
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| Exploration! |
