The Wheel of Kilmon!
About the same time as I was working on the rubber band racers, I was asked by another teacher at the school if I could make a “Wheel of Fortune” wheel for her Kindergarten class. It’s always fun building the first one of just about anything, and this thing had enough moving parts that I couldn’t resist.
Conceptually it seemed pretty simple… a lazy susan mechanism to make it spin, a clicker to make it cool, and some way to make it easy to change the pie-shaped segments. I had a couple of lazy susan mechanisms, piles of plywood, and a ShopBot so I was good to go.
My biggest concern was limiting the number of pinch points for small fingers. I decided to make the openings very large on the top, and place the clicking mechanism underneath to make it easier to protect. This worked really. A strip cut from a plastic credit card made the perfect clicker…flexible enough to let it spin easily but firm enough to be sufficiently “clicky”
My original idea was to make it stand vertically, so I extended the legs and made 2 feet for it to stand on. Unsurprisingly, lazy susan mechanisms work really well when they are horizontal, but not nearly was well when used on edge. I scraped the vertical idea, discarded the feet and stuck with it being used flat on a table or floor.
The other thing I thought was important was to make it easy to modify the “Pie Slices” to fit with different lessons. Color recognition was something she really wanted it for, but I figured that having some that were painted with blackboard paint would let her draw letters or shapes to increase the number of ways it could be used. Holding the slices in place with Velcro dots made switching them out really easy, letting me give her a couple of extra sets of pie slices.
Oh yeah…about the name. The teacher’s name was Mrs. Kilmon..what else would you call it?
