Small Scale Kinetic Sculpture
The Small Scale Kinetic Sculpture was our first introduction to kinetic sculptures, or sculptures that move or somehow give the illusion of energy. We first watched a video about a Kinetic Sculptist named Reuben Margolin and many of his different kinetic sculptures. He talked about how they move, usually in waves, and about the long and tiresome process that he goes through every time he makes a sculpture. When the video was over, we were divided into our Festival del Sol groups and assigned the task of making our own small scale Kinetic Sculpture. In the end, we were able to make a mini Kinetic Sculpture that actually worked using one paper plate, 12 paper clips, 3 straws, a handful (16) popsicle sticks, 180 inches of fishing line, and one self-tapping screw.
The thing that I am most proud of about this project is that we built this without the help of any teachers with regular everyday household items and made a working kinetic sculpture. After all, ours was one of the few that worked when we presented them that day, and is the only one that still works right now if you work the lever. If I could revise something about this project, it would be how we glued the many pieces together. Even thought the sculpture works, it looks terrible because the popsicle sticks are not aligned and they have dried hot glue sticking out of every opening. The two Habits of the Heart and Mind that I used the most during this project were Cooperation and Refinement. I used Cooperation because making this was a team effort, and if everyone would not have been invested, we probably would not have finished. I used Refinement a lot because we had to continue refining our design on paper until we felt like we finally had one that would work.