Reaching for the Stars

For a long time my son took a break from his K'Nex.  As in, he's gone at least 3 months without making anything significant.  He was more interested in programming a computer, which is his ultimate goal in life, so I guess I can't blame him.

For whatever reason, a few days ago he got the bug again and he decided to build a tower and our 7.5ft tall ceilings weren't high enough for him.  So what did he do?  He devised a pulley system to help lift his tower in our front yard.

Getting the pulley ready

Attaching the pulley to the tower

After some trial and error, the first tower iteration is up.

It was a great idea and probably would have worked.   However we found that the first design kept popping apart as it was lifted, so it was strengthened.  At that point, it was strong enough that we could just tip it up and it did fine.

Doesn't it look cool?

The tower was so tall however, that he needed to include tensioned wire (aka yarn) to help hold it upright.  That worked like a charm which was really good since it stayed up overnight and it was a little windy that night.

Looks even cooler from inside.

So how did it come down?  By cutting "wires" till it fell.

BUT, I am a homeschool mom, so before we cut it down I used it as a teaching opportunity.  I had my son measure one section of each layer of the tower (there were two layers) and then use multiplication to help determine how tall each layer was.  Then we added the height of the layers together.  Then we used division to take it from inches to feet.  Then we took that number and compared it to something we knew the height of (Daddy is 6' tall so we used him).  When the math came out that it was 5 Daddy's tall we knew the math was wrong.  So we tried again.  After doing the math a second time we came up with 12.5 ft (or about 2 Daddy's tall).  THAT however was reasonable.

After that, my son decided to count how many pieces he used to make the tower.  So after taking it apart he first weighed all the pieces together.  It was about 6 pounds.  Then he counted them as he put them away (using an abacus he bought at Ikea a while back).  He came up with the astounding figure of 1150 pieces.

That's a lot of K'nex!

All I know is, he had a great time building it, but he also learned from it as well.  He learned:

• How to make things more stable.  
• How to make a pulley.
• And he got to practice all kinds of math including addition, multiplication, division, conversions, and a bit of word problem solving.

And this folks is why I like to homeschool.  There is no better teacher than learning while doing something you enjoy.  It makes it more real and I think it "sticks" better.