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Engineering for kids

Posted on March 3, 2008
Filed Under Activity, Free, Games | 1 Comment

This week we have gone from geography, to paper car building, to engineering for kids (via building a cardboard Elizabethan theatre!) – what a fun week!

Engineering was kicked off by a link posted on Early Years HE Yahoo Group for this free bridge building game. We downloaded the 2006 version and much discussion ensued!!! In the end, we had to go and look at some examples (under records on the website) to get a good feel for design concepts. I think we ALL learned a lot about engineering and bridge building . For kids to enjoy it at the same time is brilliant!

When I later suggested we build a Geodesic Dome model from newspaper, the children jumped at the chance. This is a really fun project to do, although you definitely need team work. If you are think you would like to have a go at this, then here are my tips!

Newspaper – We used the Daily Mail (ahem! I get it from my MIL for the guinea pig cage!). It really wasn’t big enough to make the required length posts and we had to overlap two sheets.
Equipment – my stapler really wasn’t up to it towards the end – a heavy duty one would be better. We ended up having to tape some sections.
Stability – ours is pretty good but it would have been stronger if we had used several layers of newspaper per post instead of a single layer. You really would have to tape it together though!
Its HUGE!! We had planned to build it in the kitchen and move it into the playroom. When we built the base it was obvious it wasn’t going anywhere. Make sure you have a bit of space for this one.

We finished off engineering by building some models from Lego Contraptions. The projects in this are quite tricky to follow, but work cleverly. We also plan to see if we can make a swing-bridge from lego – but thats for another day!