Party of the First Part (2011) from Bernie Lubell on Vimeo.

Here is Scott Weaver spinning frisbees freestyle, then juggling them, and finally doing a blind chest roll right into the sculpture he spent the last 35 years making.

During last month’s Open MAKE we tried an activity for the first time: a free-form woodworking workshop. The idea was to not limit the visitors’ choice of what to make, but rather take their ideas and figure out, together, a way of accomplishing it. This turned out to be rather challenging, and so to try and figure out how to “plus” this activity, we gave it another go last week.

We set up a small workshop inside the niche, with a large workbench, vises, several kinds of saws, power drills, screws, and clamps.

Soon a group of girls was curious enough to ask if they could participate: we decided to keep an equal ratio of facilitators and participants, so the space was quickly filled to capacity, and we had to let everybody else know that they would have to wait, and possibly not get a chance to work with us. This is always a problem with highly facilitated activities like this one, but in this case the activity took a very long time: the first batch of girls stayed over two hours!

I started working with Mina, a delightful 7-year-old girl from Australia. She quickly learned the basics of sawing, and tried both a traditional push saw, and a Japanese pull saw, which became her favorite.

She also learned how to drill a starter hole so that she could screw two pieces of wood together, although she needed some help lifting the very heavy tool.

After grasping the basics, Mina decided that she would make a table for her collection of toys (she has over 100 teddy bears, she proudly informed me) — both in this workshop, and in last month’s Open MAKE one, we found that the majority of projects that kids settle on seem to be directly inspired by the angular shapes of the raw pieces of wood provided: tables, beds, and other objects that mostly have straight angles. I think one way to alleviate this would be to provide pre-cut round or otherwise interesting shapes.

It took Mina a long time and a lot of sawing — which didn’t come easily to her — to accomplish her goal of making a table. But to my surprise, even though she kept saying things like “This is hard!” while trying to saw through a piece of wood, she persisted until she was done, and then immediately suggested that now we should make a plate with a chicken to go on top!

Eventually we settled for making small plates, by cutting sections from a large dowel. Again, each plate took quite a large amount of arduous work, but she decided to make five of them, and then ended up making six!

Perhaps the strongest indication of how important the work had been to her is the fact that her last request, before she absolutely had to go, was to make a little sign that said “By Mina” to go with her piece. I think we couldn’t ask for more obvious evidence of ownership!

Trying this out on the floor confirmed for me that this activity is very rich, and challenging at the same time. There is a tension, I feel, between providing kids with the ability to properly use tools and to work with wood competently, and on the other hand getting them to start and hopefully finish a project.

I would really like participants to walk out of this activity feeling like they have learned how to properly saw, hammer, drill, join pieces of wood together, etcetera; in other words, I would like for people to approach woodworking with a healthy dose of respect for the craftmanship involved in it. But I’ve become convinced, after facilitating the activity, that if we focused solely on tool proficiency without a solid project to accomplish with that knowledge, it will become a stale exercise. Resolving that tension will be the key to making this activity really successful.

So, what are our next steps? Well, first of all, we’re going to start tinkering with the activity ourselves: we pulled out of our library 5 or 6 boks on woodworking projects, and will each choose one, and just try making it. I am certain that working together as a group will be very informative on which steps we might take next to make the activity better. And then we’ll take it out on the floor again, and very simply see what happens. Working with Mina confirmed for me that, even in its current embryonic stage, there is some very good content here!

Have you made a woodworking project that was particularly inspiring? If so, let us know in the comments below!

To prep for the activity, I created a stockpile of roughly boat-shaped wooden bases with holes for dowels pre-drilled at standard intervals. Then I gathered a bunch of oddly shaped scraps of wood, string, eucalyptus bark, and assorted dowels that could be added to the bases. Drawing from this variety of components, each person who participated could create a customized watercraft to float in our water-filled wine barrel, and to take home for bathtub fun.

We created small workbench with vises about two feet off the ground for young visitors to clamp their add-on boat components in place while they used traditional hand drills to make a hole for a dowel/peg corresponding with the pre-drilled holes in the boat bases. The hand drills were pretty easy to wield for more dexterous visitors, and younger kids were able to use them when partnered with someone with a little more mass who could lean on the handle while the young boat craftsperson turned the handle to work the drill. It was really satisfying to watch kids grow confident in their drilling abilities!

Using dowels both as pegs for attaching one part to another and simply as masts allowed for a good spectrum of boat complexity, and pretty much everyone enjoyed pounding dowels with large rubber mallets!

Some visitors moved back and forth between the water-filled barrel and the workbench, adjusting their boats accordingly if they initially floated sideways or flipped upside down. Others simply delighted in the fact that their creations floated at all!

I’m hoping that now, almost three weeks later, some of those boats are still getting some quality tub time in their new homes or maybe even making expeditions to the beach!

I am delighted that Scott Weaver‘s amazing sculpture is getting a lot of attention in the media (the video of his piece was picked up by many blogs and news outlets, among them KQED and SFist). So I thought it would be fun to make another short video that gives a little bit of an insight into Scott’s process and techniques, as well as his contagious personality.

[EDIT] Here is the original video that’s gotten over 1 million hits to date.

The lovely Sarah Elovich painted her nails to look like woodgrain! Strangely, brown nail polish doesn’t exist, so she mixed up her own. Brilliant!

So naturally we moved the fort into the niche, took off one side to make it fit, and added a new long short wall jutting out of the right side. The niche/fort set-up creates a small pegboard cavern in the back corner of the space which we think might provide a nice isolated spot for someone who really wants to focus, although we’ll keep an eye out to see if it gets too difficult to maneuver in the tight passageway. We’ve places the materials in two ‘salad bar’ carts with slanted surfaces to discourage building in the material storage areas and are playing the inspirational ‘pythagoras switch’ Japanese chain reaction machines. All the iterations of the environment really speaks to the way that our group continuously tweaks the elements in the space as we prototype even the most familiar activities. I’m sure that the next version of the environment will be different as we keep learning what makes these tinkering activities work best on the busy museum floor.

the current TS set-up for building marble machines.

kids and adults working on the new configuration at open:MAKE wood last Saturday

Marble Machines will be in the Tinkering Studio until May 31st, so come and build with us as we continue experimenting with this activity.

The station was a mess of shavings, twigs, wood chips, bark, and wood veneer, etc., but it was exciting to see what people came up with using the natural materials that we prepared. Here is some examples of our stop motion animation with wood!

The motion is dynamic and it is really fun to watch.

… Does it look like a wild boar?

A bit violent but makes you laugh.

We hope we’ll do more on the floor this month!