Inventors Club Fall 2015 Wrap-Up

Go-cart research.

This Saturday marks the end of another round of Inventors Club, and we’re expecting quite a variety of projects to be finished and demonstrated for friends and family.  This time around we have all sorts of things from a crossbow and a mechanical pencil shooter, to a handmade sheep that rolls around and a cardboard dog with lights that blink.  We’ll have a couple cars, a couple airplanes, and even a hovercraft.  There’s a portable Nintendo 64, a binary adder circuit, and an audio amplifier or two.  There will even be at least one robot, the beginnings of a go-cart, and a Mars rover.

Working on the circuits for a robot.

Every session of Inventors Club ends with the Big Show.  This is when the students get to show off what they’ve been working on, and explain it to their loved ones and everyone else.  At the Bakken, we believe that discussing one’s work is an essential part of inventing and engineering, whether that’s done through talking or writing.  Because of that, we like to give our participants the chance to explain their work to a group of people, and also do a small write-up about it.  Hopefully this provides an opportunity to work on their communication skills, and also helps them feel a sense of pride in what they’ve accomplished.

An in-depth discussion on soldering.

This may be the end of the fall session, and with all the holidays coming up we won’t have the next one starting until the last Saturday of January, but we’re certainly looking forward to seeing another set of new projects, and to seeing the long-term projects return for more work.  In the interim we are still running our Thursday night “Passport to Invention” open workshop program, so any child ages 9 and up can still feed that hunger for inventing all winter long.