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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 5

Rastislav Geschwandtner — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 21:51:29 +0000

There is a long day ahead of us. Kids are not going home at 5 PM like usually, but rather staying for an evening camp fire picnic and then adventurous sleeping in tents. The weather forecast is favourable – the night is supposed to be hot, so I hope everything goes well… But let’s keep the storytelling in order, shall we?
The kids came this morning all packed for our today’s overnight stay. The bags with tents were just too tempting for kids it to leave them packed. And they wouldn’t by tinkerers if they couldn’t build their own tent.
[See image gallery at www.kreolab.sk]
There is another challenging day ahead of us tomorrow. The last one in this session. And after a one day break, six more days with another group of children.

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Tinkering School Bratislava 2012 – Day 4

Rastislav Geschwandtner — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 21:10:57 +0000

This morning we had a dilemma which project to chose for today, because we had prepared more projects we could possibly do in a week. Eventually we decided to use the long hazelnut tree sticks kids brought from the forest yesterday and we will lash them together to create a shelter.
[See image gallery at www.kreolab.sk]
Well, parents are here, so we are forced to pack everything and leave it for tomorrow.
We have an overnight stay at Tinkering School tomorrow. We will put up tents and tinker whole day and even after it gets dark. Since I’ll probably not be able to write a blog tomorrow, you can read all about our Friday’s adventures in two days. Talk to you then.

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