R is for Racer

If you were a hands-on kind of person, the early 2000’s were a frustrating time for education. The shop classes that I remember when I was in school had been all but eliminated. Dale Dougherty and the Maker Movement hadn’t yet legitimized “making” in the classroom. And the SOL…Standards of Learning…tests made it tough for a teacher to do anything outside the prescribed curriculum. I decided in my own small way to fight this trend to eliminate anything that wasn’t considered traditionally academic.

This rubber band racer project was created to help my wife’s elementary school class on a couple of fronts. “Officially” it was an exploration of shapes, mechanisms, and motion to fulfill those Virginia State Standards of Learning. Each pre-kindergarten class learn a new letter every week at school, and “R” week was coming up. But underlying it all was my guerilla attempt to get kids making something with their hands! Of course geometry and spelling and history are critical things to learn, but I felt ( and still feel) strongly that kids also needed to be able to sand and paint and hammer, until they had something they had made and that they could be proud of.

Since I was funding this out of my pocket I needed something simple and cheap. After trying a couple of prototypes I ended up with a simple rubber band powered race car that was easy to cut, didn’t cost a lot, and could be assembled by pre-kindergarten age kids.

I had to make 37 racer kits, enough for both pre-k classes, so I made a shopvac-powered vacuum jig to make it easy to cut the parts out of a stack of equal-sized blanks. And since dowels are no more accurately sized than plywood, I had to take calipers to the hardware store to buy enough some-sized dowels to make all the kits and then resize the holes in the toolpath file to fit that specific size dowel.

Of course the best part was watching the kids build, and then race, their racers. The first morning was spent sanding (with the bonus of having “R”ough sandpaper for R week!) and painting. After the paint had dried over night they spent the next morning putting their racers together and then racing them.

For a while at least they got to do what kids naturally want to do…build something with their own hands!