My parents came down to visit this weekend, bearing three sets of vintage Tinker Toys for Alex’s birthday. (Amazon reviews noted that modern Tinker Toys are poorly machined and don’t fit together well, so my mother worked eBay magic.) Alex has been building ever since.
I was particularly taken with a set of four meshed gears that she made. This may be standard Tinker Toy stuff, but my limited childhood experience with them never extended to moving parts.
Alex had a very “making things” birthday. We gave her a Snap Circuits set
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I’m fascinated by how Alex doesn’t quite answer the questions it seems like you’re asking in the video, how did she know that she could make gears. It’s clear that she’s so familiar with the concepts and vocabulary of gears that she doesn’t think to say “it’s just like in the Meccano” or “Daddy showed me how to make two gears so I made four” or “there’s a picture on the box”.
That kind of four-gear thing is hard to make work right unless there is a little bit of flexibility in the fit, the way there is with Alex’s setup. But at the same time, it won’t work at all unless the Tinkertoys are well machined, none of the shafts is warped, and none of the holes are stretched, so your eBay shopper did a great job!
Hobbitbabe, that’s the thing – there isn’t a picture on the box, Daddy didn’t show her how to make one, and we don’t even know what Meccano is. That’s why I was trying to figure out where she got the idea. She’s played with Tinker Toys at the homeschool community center, and I asked her if someone there made gears. She said no. I think a kid at the homeschool center did show her how to make a moveable shaft, though.
Edited to add: we did watch an episode of a math-based cartoon show that focused very heavily on gears. But that was probably almost a year ago.
That’s pretty good stuff. The boys have made a lot of moving and spinning things, helicopters and the like, but I don’t recall them making gears before. I’ve had the tinker toys put up for the last year – maybe it’s time to pull them out again.
Does she have Legos?
I now also have Snap Circuits on the boys’ Amazon wish list. I get the coolest toy ideas from you.
Charlotte, Snap Circuits are amazing! They’re beautifully designed so that kids can use them independently – far different from my childhood electronics set, where I had to try to capture the ends of wires in little metal springs. The pieces do literally snap together with the same kind of snaps used in clothing.
It didn’t take Alex long before she was trying to design her own circuits. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes she can even figure out why they don’t work.
She has Legos, but she doesn’t play with them very much. I think she thinks of them as more of a boy toy. I’m not sure why they wound up in that category when Snap Circuits, Tinker Toys, and her chemistry set didn’t…