The bell rings and a minute later, a group of excited ninth and tenth graders comes bounding into my room. They immediately began to start pulling out greasy engine parts, a bike frame and large pieces of wood to get started on their project. I yell out. “Hi guys. Aren’t you going to eat lunch first?” They said they wanted to get going on their project first. They were busy working on converting a bike to a gasoline engine model, with the longer term goal of creating a prototype go-cart to drive the school mascot around the playing field. I had my doubts about whether they would finish this project before graduation but went along with their ideas.
The bike/go cart idea has been part of a three year project that that they funded by creating their own lines of lip balm for faculty, back in middle school. They are one of a few different groups of kids that are all working different ideas for projects from solar power to electrical games, to rockets. Rather than a high powered competition the students enjoy a relaxed place to collaborate and carry out creative ideas during their lunch time.
Taking a look around the room, besides the regular lab tables, sinks, and fume hood, you can see an assortment of power and hand tools, electrical and electronic components, kid’s projects in various states of completion, pneumatic tools, power supplies, soldering irons, all kinds of adhesives, fasteners and other hardware, and building materials like metal pipes, PVC, wood, foam, recyclables of all kinds, and in one corner was a ten foot wind tunnel. For the past 20 years I have described my classroom as the equivalent of a MacGyver shop in a school without a shop program. But even more importantly is how kids feel about this space, which is their own place to hang out, and talk about geeky things and make things together.
The boys working on the bike have just realized that they have mounted the engine on in a way that doesn’t allow the pedals to turn and they are running out of time and still need to eat lunch. They start packing up for today, grumbling about not having enough time. They’ll be back tomorrow. Back to the drawing board.
The bike/go cart idea has been part of a three year project that that they funded by creating their own lines of lip balm for faculty, back in middle school. They are one of a few different groups of kids that are all working different ideas for projects from solar power to electrical games, to rockets. Rather than a high powered competition the students enjoy a relaxed place to collaborate and carry out creative ideas during their lunch time.
Taking a look around the room, besides the regular lab tables, sinks, and fume hood, you can see an assortment of power and hand tools, electrical and electronic components, kid’s projects in various states of completion, pneumatic tools, power supplies, soldering irons, all kinds of adhesives, fasteners and other hardware, and building materials like metal pipes, PVC, wood, foam, recyclables of all kinds, and in one corner was a ten foot wind tunnel. For the past 20 years I have described my classroom as the equivalent of a MacGyver shop in a school without a shop program. But even more importantly is how kids feel about this space, which is their own place to hang out, and talk about geeky things and make things together.
The boys working on the bike have just realized that they have mounted the engine on in a way that doesn’t allow the pedals to turn and they are running out of time and still need to eat lunch. They start packing up for today, grumbling about not having enough time. They’ll be back tomorrow. Back to the drawing board.