The older kids were out on a field trip and weren’t able to attend Friday’s meeting, so we set it up as an extension of the previous meeting, this essentially the same goals. This gave us the opportunity to work more closely with some of the younger kids on their roles in the club.
One experience that was of particular interest came when the maker team was disassembling one of the traditional inkjet printers. They brought it to a point where they could clearly see a plastic carriage, riding across two meal rods, which was attached to a belt in the back. The belt was wound over an idler at one end, and a motor with a pulley at the other. As we were exploring and manipulating this assembly, I saw a couple of faces light up: “This is exactly like the 3D printer!” said two of the makers, almost in unison. Indeed, the part was arranged almost exactly like the X axis of the 3D printer. The kids were pretty quick to suggest that we might use that very assembly as the X axis for the printer build.
All the other teams were hard at work on their respective parts of the project, each with an adult adviser. The membership list is up to date now, and includes privacy information. The budget is set up with some rough target numbers. The build and BOM teams worked together to identify the missing components. The blog team set up their blog and practices posting.