planning kid city
With a day of tool use under their belts, the Brightworks kids started getting to work learning more about the materials and sizing requirements they need to build Kid City, as well as their individual projects.
This morning, we talked as a group about the dimensions of the two-story Kid City, with big rooms on the first floor and smaller rooms on the second.
Then they headed over to the foundation and measured out their spaces on the floor. The kids’ houses are going to be huge!
Band time.
The kids worked on their declarations and made sure they got Gever’s OK stamp so they could move forward with their projects.
After snack it was time to lay down the outlines for Kid City structures.
Some worked on getting certified to use the tools. Audrey explained drilling holes to Chane: “If you slow down the drill at the end, you can get through the hard parts.”
The collaborators presented the kids with a building challenge: construct the tallest free-standing structure possible. The tall structures taught them about making good joints when they build.
Elizabeth did an incredible job teaching the kids to use one-point perspective in drawing. Some used two or even three-point perspective!
Planning.
Tall structures must have strong joints – or they fall!
At the end of the day, Gever did a quick demonstration of load-bearing physics.
The kids were shocked when the wood broke under stress, but even more impressed when it held!
The beginnings of something amazing.
sewers, murals, pipes
Today sewer expert Greg Braswell from the San Francisco Department of Public Works talked to the kids about where water goes in San Francisco. They drew a diagram:
They used those ideas to create a sewer system of their own.
Mural painting continued.
As did the Google SketchUp experimenting.
Mix in a little paper art and frivolity and you’ve got a Brightworks day!
thinking about kid city
We’re really excited to be able to offer our kids a space of their own at school – not a cubby, not a locker, but their very own multiple-foot room in Kid City that they will build for themselves. Today we started really planting seeds about how their Kid City will begin, evolve, and change depending on the Brightworks city ordinances, the needs of each kid in their own space, evacuation procedures, and building codes – aka, if the building is going to be more than one story tall, it has to hold the weight of all the collaborators at once.
To help the kids think about where to start in their planning process, we asked city planner Adam Krivatsy to join us in talking about what kinds of important qualities cities must have in order to be functional, livable, and living.
At lunch, Mackenzie told a story about Marco Polo describing to Genghis Khan all the cities he’d ever seen. When the cities he’d described all ended up being Venice from different perspectives, the kids offered up their own cities – their own views of their San Francisco.
The mystery of the day was about the graffiti artist who kept tagging the inside of the cardboard hut that the kids made last week. The graffiti artist kept writing “Guess who?” all over the walls, and the kid detectives asked questions and compared everyone’s handwriting to weed out the guilty party. Unfortunately, no one confessed, and no perp was found.
What does a city look like? The city planners had to make a plan to make theirs work best.
Legos were best for testing out theories.
Google SketchUp has become a useful tool in planning the construction in Kid City.
With the help of city designer Bryan Grunwald, the kids learned about managing the layout of a city. Where’s the best place to build a bridge? A shopping center? The residential homes? Town square?
We’ll have to see what principles from Adam and Bryan become part of the plans for Kid City when construction starts next week!
