Design Challenge: Craft Stick Trebuchet

There are so many fun things you can do with craft sticks, and giving your kids design challenges and a stack of sticks and other supplies is a great way to get them thinking, engineering and making hypotheses.

I love this idea for constructing a craft stick trebuchet from Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls. She gives the step by step for how to make it, and offers lots of ideas for how to make it into an engineering challenge, such as using balls of different weights, using a longer or shorter arm on the trebuchet and launching your projectile from different places on the arm.

Check her site for printable observation logs as well. This looks like so much fun!

Have you ever made one? I’d love to hear about it.

[Photo: Frugal Fun for Boys and Girls.]

Several countries have a day set aside to honor and recognize their inventors, but Nov. 9 is a special one that’s known as Tag der Erfinder in German. It’s celebrated in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and it falls on Nov. 9 because that’s the birthday of Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy Lamarr is widely known as an actress but there’s a lot more to her story. You can get a little of it geared to little kids in the Little People, Big Dreams book Hedy Lamarr (32 pages, hardcover, published 2023 by Frances Lincoln Childrens Books, suggested retail price $15.99).

The book explores her birth in Austria and how she spent time when she was young coming up with inventions. She became an actress, married an arms dealer, made her escape to America and became an actress again.

But she also helped develop a frequency-hopping signal device for airplanes that was used by the Americans and their allies during World War II. That technology became the basis for wireless technology such as wifi and GPS.

While Inventor’s Day is a great time to learn about Hedy Lamarr, you can take this opportunity to check out books and do little studies on lots of different inventors. If there’s an inventor or an invention your child is particularly interested in, that’s a great place to start. It’s fun to think about all the things we use every day that didn’t always exist; someone had to invent them!

For a start here at Craft Gossip you can learn more about Garrett Morgan, who invented traffic lights; Maria Oroso, who developed a clay oven that could cook food without electricity; and more female inventors and scientists.

And for more general inventors’ fun, check out this inventors word search from Fun Findery (and another from Let’s Do Puzzles) or take a quiz on inventors and their inventions from Flanders Family Home Life.

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