An Alarming Discovery

My dog, Odin, is constantly getting into things he shouldn't. It's a real problem at our house. I asked our after school tinkering kids if they thought we might be able to design an alarm system to solve my problem. Of course, they were intrigued.  We dug right in, reminding ourselves of all we now knew about circuits.

First we designed our systems. Graph paper and clipboards make the entire design process much more official.

Then we all set to work:

We made some prototypes:

We tested our ideas...

....and finally, trapped the parents as they opened the door at pickup time.

We also made more videos explaining how our systems worked.  This was the culmination of our three-series after school tinkering program focused on circuitry. We began by learning about circuits, we designed and made bristle bots, and finally designed an alarm system to solve a problem. By the end of our series, the kids were completing the entire NGSS engineering cycle.  

In case your curious...my dog is still getting in to trouble.

Materials:

Buzzers

Old foam core museum labels

Wire

Batteries

Conductive materials including foil, tacks, binder clips

Electrical tape, duct tape

Wire cutters & strippers

Scissors

Markers

The thinking behind the tinkering

How can we create a new generation of kids who are no longer passive users of technology, but instead are thinkers and makers? That's what happened here in Windsor. It's our heritage and it's our challenge.

Before fully diving in to a maker space project, it seemed appropriate to do some research. I began with the history.  The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors who Make Amermica Great helped me to connect the idea of tinkering to the past. While the word "tinkering" might sound like someone who is aimlessly messing around, it is a deeply innovative practice--building something out of existing, available parts for an entirely new purpose. It is exactly what happened here in Windsor as the development of interchangeable parts and increasing precision were iterative processes.


Invent to Learn, Tinkering: Kids Learn to Make Stuff, and the NGSS Science Standards all helped me to think about to shape a learning environment where kids would be innovative.  All agreed that we want kids to be unencumbered, filled with possibility. We want them to think, make, and improve. We want them to collaborate. We want them to have opportunities to reflect, talk about their work, and share with others.

That's the philosophy behind our project.