Jungle Adventure! - Day 1 - Week 1 (Mark Day School)

Day 1 of Summer Tinkering Camp has so much excitement in the air! Our Tinkerers arrive wondering what the theme for the week will be. We start our day off with our Goals for the week: 1. Collaborate and Make Friends, 2. Make Mistakes and Learn From Them, 3. Try Harder than Usual, and 4. Build something BIGGER than ourselves. We also brainstorm Group Agreements in order to discuss how we will treat each other and keep each other safe while we work.

And then it’s time for tool training! Each tinkerer learns how to use our three main tools: clamps, cordless drills, and a chop saw (aka mitre saw).

Armed with this knowledge and practice using tools, our tinkerers are ready to start their first Design & Build session. But first, the theme:

Jungle Adventure!

“You are all scientists chosen for a special mission to study a rare creature. While flying to an island where you believe the creature is, you have to make an emergency landing. You land slowly but crash into the island. Everyone is fine but there is a dangerous river between you and the rare creature. How will you get across?”

Our tinkerers sketched ideas and then collaborators helped with the not always easy process of combining them into a series of builds that we will work on for the rest of the week.

Our afternoon wrapped up with measuring and making a few cuts on the chop saw. Sometimes it’s easiest to use a tinkerer’s height as a measurement so one group decided the bridge should be “four Olivia’s long.” This helped us determine length, width and height without getting bogged down in details. And then we were able to go back and fill in the actual measurements in feet and inches.

Here are even more photos from today: