Build! Create! Invent!

After March Break, we spent two weeks working on a variety of activities for the Design Space Theme. 

Make Your Own Spinner
We had purchased kits to make spinners from the 20th UK 2020 Independent Trip Unit for Engineering Month (see instructions below) and brought them out tonight. Each Guide had a design template, cardboard and a bearing to make her spinner. Each design was unique!

Spaghetti Structures
Earlier in the year, we had a request to the do 'spaghetti and marshmallow building', which fit in well with our theme. Teams worked with raw spaghetti and mini marshmallows to build different structures. 


Bridge Building
To test our engineering skills further, we had a Bridge Building contest! Bridges were made from a strip of paper attached with masking tape between two tables 12 inches apart. We had to be creative with the weights, and used the scissors, rules and glue sticks from the supply box to test each bridge!


Design Your Own Invention  
Week Two was devoted to all things inventing. We started out by learning about the inventors of things we are all familiar with, including Frank Epperson (Popsicles), George Nissen (Trampoline), Louis Braille (Braille), and Albert Sadacca (Christmas Lights) before turning our attention to creating our own inventions. Each Guide or group was asked to come up with a invention that a girl their age could use to make day-to-day things easier or the community a better place. They also had to think about what their invention would cost to make, design a blueprint, and build a prototype. We didn't quite make it to the prototype stage, but everyone had fun coming up with unique inventions, including:

• Self-Building Houses
• Infoggable Mirror
• Forever Hot Mug 
• Self-Cooling Computer 
• Magic Detangler 

Links:

• Spinner Activity Instructions (20th UK 2020 Independent Trip Unit)
• Invent It, Build It (PBS Kids Design Squad)
• Entrepreneurs and Inventions (Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City) 

Be An Inventor!

This week the Guides used their creativity to make their own inventions as part of the Inventing Badge!

The evening started out with 30 minutes of  Patrol Time, and each patrol worked on a different activity:

• Trillium Patrol - "Starry, Starry Night" - realized that it wasn't dark enough to go stargazing and substituted an activity on finding directions using the sun and shadows
• Rose Patrol - "Stretching" - did individual and group stretching and yoga exercises
• Pansy Patrol - "Poptastic" - attempted to pop popcorn in tinfoil dishes over tealights (they were unsuccessful - but we popped the popcorn in a paper bag in the microwave later on)
• Daffodil Patrol - "Quizzes" and "Fashionista" - worked on quizzes about health and laundry, and then created their own newspaper fashions

The main part of the meeting started with our usual opening, followed by a game of "Rose Tag" - invented last week by the Rose Patrol.

Our first activity was the Inventing Jeopardy Game from the Quebec Inventing Badge Instant Meeting. The game has questions in four categories - Inventors, Communication, Travel and Other. We had fun playing the game and the questions had a good balance of easy to more difficulty - some of them really challenged the girls to think!

The remainder of the meeting was spent inventing and building prototypes! The girls were provided with a variety of craft supplies, recyclable materials, newspaper, tape, scissors, rulers and markers, and let their imaginations go! At the end of the evening, the girls shared their prototypes with the rest of the group. We closed with reminders and Taps.