I don’t remember exactly when the first conversation happened, but somewhere through chatting on Twitter and the interwebs, Colleen Graves and I decided that it would be awesome to connect our Maker kids. I have an afterschool group that meets on Mondays at the same time as her group, even though we’re in different time zones. I had some technical difficulties the first time we tried to connect, and ended up Skyping over my phone. It was more informal, students sharing various projects we were working on. After that first meet-up, we decided to up our students’ game by giving them a joint design challenge, The Catapult Challenge!
Even though it started out as the Catapult Challenge, it quickly became the “make-something-that-flings-something-across-the-room-without-poking-someone’s-eye-out” challenge for my kids. There were crossbows, ballistas and trebuchets (which are NOT catapults, my students were quick to explain to me). We had some regular old catapults too of course. As we were sharing our projects on Vine, Twitter and Instagram, Colleen was sharing projects from her students as well.
At the end of the challenge, we met up in a Google Hangout and shared our projects. Colleen’s students had made some amazing giant catapults capable of flinging multiple ketchup packets at once. My kids proudly showed off their creations and were ecstatic that they worked (the trebuchet was having some issues).
We’re in the midst of our next challenge now, the MaKeyMaKey challenge! More on that later, but be sure that you’re following me on Instagram to get the latest updates.
Ahh! I was just thinking I should find a class, challenge them to a catapult challenge, and then blog about it…3 minutes later looking for something else I end up finding your post 🙂