Kids woke up at about six thirty. When I woke up a little later girls were all excited to tell me that after I fell asleep last night they lit their torches and played cards. Mathias from the neighbouring tent joined them too.  So that’s why there was so much giggling and whispering coming from their tent last night. Being my daugter, Pavla knew that I’d quickly fall asleep and they were scheming. Well, I’m curious to see how well will they do with the drills today when they stayed up late last night. Teresa had to wake up and leave even earlier because she is playing soccer for a team and they have a match abroad today. Well, today we will have to do without Teresa and Richard.

The last day of this year’s Tinkering School Bratislava is over. These were two fantastic weeks that we will long keep in our memories. Kids were fantastic and it was a pleasure working with them. To summarise my feelings and findings and to draw any plans for the future, I’ll allow my self a little bit of time to let the whole think sink in a bit. After that I’ll write one more concluding blog post.

But before that, thank you for following us a keeping your fingers crossed for us. Your every positive feedback encouraged us and gave us strength. Good buy at some other interesting project.

Rasto, Jana and Pavla Geschwandtner

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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.
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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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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.
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See you again tomorrow.

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