Читать книгу Making Inventive Wooden Toys - Bob Gilsdorf - Страница 7

PREFACE

Have a look at the projects listed in the Contents? Ready to go full steam ahead? Well, there’s more! Yes, these are high-octane, exciting, slightly bizarre toys that you build yourself (with some grown-up help to use the power tools), but there is a secret treasure buried deep within each project. However, finding the riches that they hold requires actually making and playing with them. In this book we call it “playing” whereas scientists and engineers call it “experimenting.” You have to try out your toy, see what it does, tweak it a little, and observe what happens next. So what treasures will be revealed to the inventor, creator, and maker of each project? These toys each contain real-life lessons in science, technology, engineering, art, and math—aka STEAM.

Science comes to life in these toys, and you actually see the laws of physics right before your eyes. Storing energy sounds mighty complicated, but that’s exactly what a rubber band does when it is stretched to launch a catapult or when you wind up a spool of string. Can you store twice the energy with two rubber bands? There’s only one way to find out and it’s the fun way—just do it! Does stretching a rubber band further store more energy? That will be obvious when you try it. Stretch it too far and it breaks. Now you have an engineering problem to solve. Engineers basically exploit the laws of physics to make and do useful things.

WARNING: THIS IS NOT YOUR NORMAL PROJECT BOOK!

Inventing toys is a wild, bumpy ride with plenty of experiments and mistakes. For each project, I’m going to share some of the ideas I used to start construction. I’ll also show you some challenges (aka major failures!) I faced. But I won’t be giving you precise steps explaining exactly how to build each toy. Study the illustrations, learn from mistakes, and keep trying, as all great inventors do. The answer will eventually come, and when it does, yelling “Awesome!” sure feels good. Start creating your own amazing toys!

Build the Top Launcher and you’ll learn all about the “conservation of angular momentum” without even having to crack open a physics textbook. A spinning top doesn’t sound very high tech until you learn that the exact same principles are used to position satellites in outer space. Of course, engineers like to change the name from “spinning top” to “gyroscope” to sound more impressive.

But let’s not get bogged down in all the educational stuff, let’s just have fun building, decorating, and discovering what fun we can have when we make something by ourselves. That alone is enough for the laws of physics to be stamped into your minds. Let the making begin!