We’re doing “Tinker Your Way Out of This!” again this year at Maker Faire, and we are looking for sponsors to cover the development, deployment, and moment-to-moment maintenance of the puzzle stations.

Tah dah! Happy kid solves the Tough as Nails puzzle.

Our theme this year is Hex-nuts! We’ve got five diabolical puzzles planned for the kids (generally, ages 4 and up):

• Pingpongorama kids will have to tame the forces of chaos and guide a rolling ping pong ball down an inclined plane into a goal – three times in a row!?.
• Suspense challenges kids to engineer a bridge capable of carrying a certain number of hex-nuts – using only common clothes pins!
• Tower of Doom anyone can stack up hex nuts, but will they be able to do it on a slope?
• Lightning Run back by popular demand, and updated (now with hex-nuts!), only a clever (or devious) child will be able to get the spark all the way from the Tesla Coil to the lightbulb.
• Tough As Nails with the addition of devious bath-toys and an improved continuity detector, this diabolical puzzle will challenge even the most ingenious children.

Visit our handy pledge form and pitch in to help cover the costs. Get your name on the official sponsor plaque for each puzzle!

If you want to visit us at Maker Faire this year we’re in the same neighborhood as previous years, but possibly easier to find!  We’re in the Expo Hall again, all the way in the north-east corner.   Booth #147: take a left if you’re entering from Fiesta Hall (and the rest of the Faire), and head past the Lego Users Group towards the concessions/restrooms.  If you come to Schmahl Science you’ve gone too far – turn around and you should see us.

Hopefully you’ll  make the effort to track us down and Tinker Your Way Out Of This!

Peek behind the scenes to see Gever developing the puzzles: Flickr set.

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be speaking and answering questions on Thursday, May 1st at the Maker Day event before the Maker Faire and then again on Saturday, May 3rd, the first day of the Maker Faire. I’ll be doing an expanded version of “Five Dangerous Things” with bonus topic “Make Your Own School”.

Also this year, our Adobe project is a super-cool laser cutter, make-and-take, lantern – stop by to check it out. Get there early to avoid the loooong lines.

Hope to see you all there!

Adrienne wanted to keep her boat as simple as possible.

She started with two floats, like everyone else, then realized that one would suffice. Once she had one float, the larger pair of rubber bands was replaced with a single smaller band, then filled the motor compartment (juice bottle) with water and set a session record with her pared down design.

Jeremy noticed that the PVC motor solution (orginally intended to be slung under the bottle) would fit inside the mouth of the bottle.

In this case, side floats were required to keep the boat from rotating. This worked (like in the first side-float design posted earlier) since the PVC weighed down the rear of the boat and kept the propeller submerged. The high angle of attack also let the bow of the boat ride up on the water and succesfully break the beam sensors on both ends of the track.