Making a Crane

A Covid-Friendly Makerspace Activity

I run a Makerspace. Usually, we dig into buckets of electronics. The kids explore microwaves, iPads, CD players, laptops, cell phones, blenders, drills. They take things apart and put stuff back together using shared materials in an area just for us.

With Covid, I have had to rethink the way things are done. For starters, kids are restricted to their classrooms for contract tracing purposes, which means the Makerspace Lab is off limits and I have to travel. The Makerspace Lab became a Makerspace Kit. I also had to think about transfers to virtual learning. Could the activities and culture we were building together continue online?

Some things never change. We still start with a greeting, a share, and a creative warm up (like making a giraffe behind your head with just a sticky note— so more in the “extra” section). We still talk about the design process: sketching, ideating, prototyping, getting feedback. We still practice the 4Cs: Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Creativity, Communication (though I haven’t found it important to name those skills, we use them). We still make cool stuff.

For day one of Makerspace, we made cranes.

the result: cranes in use

It was minimalistic enough that I could make it happen with very few and cheap materials. It leans heavily on communication and collaboration because operating the crane requires everybody’s effort, thinking, and agreement. Perfect.

So, after the creative warm up, volunteers passed out the following materials.

• (1) paper clip per student
• (1) string per student
• (1) rubber band per group
• (1) cup per group

Building the crane is pretty simple. You tie the paper clip to the string. Then you hook all the paper clips to one rubber band. voilà. (You really don’t even need a paperclip. You could just attach the string directly to the rubber band, no problem.)

The result was pretty cool.

the crane result

As a reflection — Makerspace in the era of covid has me thinking, “how can I leverage the simplest, cheapest materials to continue to provide an amazing experience for makers?” The scrappiness, it turns out, fits the maker movement well.

Extras

Want more? Here you go.

My daily carry.

My daily carry. When I need to move between classrooms, I have found a small tray helpful for essentials like sticky notes, pens/pencils, paper clips, sticky dots, string, and rubber bands.

A creative warm up.

A creative warm up. Kids made a giraffe behind their head (so without looking) using a sticky note. Kids presented their works of art by describing the parts and intention. I’ve done this with adults too. Just as effective.

Tip for cutting string.

If you need lots of string, loop it around a chair or desk, then cut.

Extension.

see if the crane operators can build more complex structures than your typical house-of-cards tower. Suggest making a vertical tower instead of a pyramid.