Young Inventors Summer 2012

Just completed two summer workshops at the Kimball Art Center, in Park City, Utah. The morning sessions were for “Teen Inventors,” aged from 11 to 17 years, and the afternoon sessions were for “Young Inventors,” aged 5 to 10 years. Most inventors completed an invention a day – which was pretty fast going! One vehicle had a phenomenal speed – probably because the motor was loaded to the max with a much higher than spec. voltage – the gearing was pretty aggressive too. There were two attempts at building types of hovercraft but more work was needed to improve performance – problems were with an air flow-back. Performance, oddly, could well have been improved by allowing air leakage but we ran out of time. We also had two water based vehicles and all sorts of flying and land based vehicles.

We tried different ways to add a new dimension to the workshops by adding game elements – racing, distance, point scoring in game play etc., but the most successful was a sort of “battle pit” where insect like mini-bots interacted in a confined walled space. See the video by pressing the first photo above. Next time I think we’ll spend time building walled tracks with obstacles – to give more of a challenge to the land based inventions.