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Tinkering School Bratislava 2012 – Day 10

Rastislav Geschwandtner — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 21:43:31 +0000

I’m happy to announce that we have survived our yesterday’s camping a today we successfully finished this year’s Tinkering School Bratislava. All the tinkerers have survived and they are back in the beds tonight. However, we are a few days behind with our blog so I owe you the report for the past three days. We continued without Daniel who, unfortunately, got sick. Ok. let’s go.
[See image gallery at www.kreolab.sk]
For more about the derby of the season FC Debarked vs. FC Barked and about how we were visited by angels at night read our tomorrow’s blog post. There are two more days and one more night full of tinkering ahead of us. Stay well spirited and tuned.

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Tinkering School Bratislava 2012 – Day 7

Rastislav Geschwandtner — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 18:22:45 +0000

Here we come again with Session Two and a new children. Well, save from Pavla who is staying for this session too.
After short looking around and a short talk about our rules we head-jumped to our first project. After our last week’s fantastic experience with chair building from strips of plywood and wooden blocks we decided to repeat the project this week as well. We will make do with cordless drills, one-size screws and the precut material. Cordless drills are fantastic tools and children just love them.
[See image gallery at www.kreolab.sk]
We saw once again that chair building from plywood and blocks of wood is a marvellous activity for kids. A chair can be anything from a single strip of plywood supported by two wooden blocks as legs to elaborate royal thrones with all kinds of bells and whistles. With this activity children are simply doomed to success. The process is fun from start to finish and the outcome is never the same but always surprising. Matt and Adam are a living proof that a suitable light-weight cordless drill (our lightest one weighs just 1 kg) can be efficiently handled even by 7 year olds. The activity is also a great starter for more challenging stuff where team work is required.
See you again tomorrow.

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Tinkering School Bratislava 2012 – Day 6

Rastislav Geschwandtner — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 21:27:31 +0000

Note: Pavla helped me with writing the blog post today. Her comments are in italics.

I cannot imagine a better weather for camping. After a hot summer night spent in the tents in our garden we woke up to a beautiful morning. I have no idea at what time the kids woke up. All I know is that when the grandma went to buy fresh groceries at 6 AM, she heard kids playing and fooling around. (I had a great night’s sleep because I didn’t have to write a blog 🙂 Really, who wood sleep when roosters are crowing and you can jump out of your sleeping bag and go fooling around in the net.
[See image gallery at www.kreolab.sk]
Session One of Tinkering School Bratislava is over. We all had a great time over the past week. I believe that kids are leaving with having a better idea of how things work and what’s hidden under plastic covers of the appliances. I hope that they are also taking away an experience that they are able to tackle even problems that sometimes may seem to be incredibly hard or impossible.

For children, they have a few more days of the summer holiday left. And for us, there is a short one day break and then a new group of kids on Monday. Most of them are a little bit older. We have plan, but as always, we will let ourselves drift on the tides of imagination, wishes and needs of the children. One or two projects may be similar, but we will definitely do some new things as well. Follow us to see how we are doing.

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Tinkering School Bratislava 2012 – Day 3

Rastislav Geschwandtner — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 21:42:48 +0000

After two days spent in the backyard we set on a trip to the woods with knifes in our pockets. Originally, we wanted to get kids some practice in using pocket knives and lash a structure made of hazelnut branches, but the events had a different twist to them once again 😉
Jana stayed home to cook lunch and in stead of her the grandpa joined as as a forest guide. He knew of a place with an abundance of young hazelnut trees. While I helped kids to find and collect some suitable sized sticks, the grandpa was teaching them some basics of whittling.
[See image gallery at www.kreolab.sk]
We had kind of relaxing day today. Let’s see what we will embark on tomorrow.

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Tinkering School Bratislava 2012 – Day 2

Rastislav Geschwandtner — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 21:55:42 +0000

Note: Pavla and Ema helped Rasto to write today’s blog post. Their comments are in italics.

My eyes were still half closed and my breakfast unfinished when first kids arrived in the morning at 7:45. We had an excellent plan prepared for today. Our intention was to start with a new activity, but as soon as kids arrived they grabbed their cordless drills and started improving and modifying the chairs they made yesterday. They got so involved in it! It became clear to me that they just don’t have enough of practising the the skill they learned yesterday. OK, changing plans. Let’s go for the Plan B. Let’s drive some more screws.

After the terrible tsunami a group of unfortunate Quameaukirikis got trapped on a little island surrounded by water infested with sharks. They desperately need help. One of the options is to make some kind of a catapult by which we would be able to shoot some food packages to the island. But kids decided for the other option – to build a bridge. Well, obviously this is more permanent solution. A catapult would help only temporarily. I cannot but totally agree with them.

After my short introduction to the concept of closed triangles in bridge and crane structures children got to taking apart their beloved chairs. The thing is we will need a lot of material for the bridge. One group went to survey the disaster area (bottom end of the garden) and find out what would be the best place to build a bridge at. We discovered that the sea is the narrowest between the last elevated garden terrace and the lowest branch of the nearby walnut tree. We need to bridge a 4 metre distance.
[See image gallery at www.kreolab.sk]
See you again tomorrow.

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