For our Family Inventors’ Lab class (a STEM class for preschool and kindergarten age), we have built a fun tool, which encourages the kids to tinker – see my last post for how kids play with a wind tube. This post is about the tinkering process we used to build and refine our DIY wind tube.
a big, powerful fan – we use the Honeywell HF-910 Turbo Force. (My colleagues tried using a smaller Honeywell, and smaller hoops to save money, and their version can just barely lift a scarf up and out of the tube. It’s just not nearly as fun.) The HF-910 is no longer available but the Air Monster and the Comfort Zone Powrcurve look like they’d work. You need a big fan that can be tilted so it’s horizontal to the floor.
an acetate sheet Ours is 40″ tall. It comes in a 12 foot roll, you’ll only need about 4 feet of it. Exploratorium’s directions called for .0075 ml thickness, we used .01. It’s a little pricier but it’s been very durable which is important to us because we transport it to several sites and has survived ten years of small children banging on it. (Other builders have used 1/32″ thick polycarbonate, but I haven’t found that in large sheets.)
spacers – see below
Assembly
We cut the acetate sheet, rolled it to make a tube, and assembled the tube with the hoops. Definitely a two person job. You can clamp the plastic between the inner and outer layer of the hoop, just like you would fabric. We then used clear packing tape to tape the seam. (We also taped over the metal clamps on the hoops, and the edges of the acetate sheet on one end, just so kids wouldn’t scrape themselves while playing.)
Spacers
You need spacers to lift the tube up off the fan. Exploratorium recommends wooden spacers that you cut a notch in. We built spacers with Duplos and set the tube on those. (You can see them in the videos in this post.) For our family, that worked fine, because it was easy to rebuild them if they got knocked off. For class, I wanted something I didn’t have to rebuild. I found some giant clothespins, which worked great. (You can find 6″ or 9″ options. Nine is better.)
For kids over age 5 or so, that’s all you need. You just set the tube on top of the fan, and you’re fine. They may knock it off a couple times, but quickly learn to be more careful. If it does get knocked off and lands on someone’s head, it’s startling but does not hurt.
Tie the Tube Down?
For kids under 5, you’ll want to tie the tube to the fan so it doesn’t get knocked off as much.
Exploratorium recommended drilling holes in the spacers, disassembling the fan, and fastening the spacers on with zip ties. We decided it would be much easier to just thread pipe cleaners through the springs on the clothes pins, and loop those down under the fan and back up again (no dis-assembly required) and twist together to tighten. It was easy to do, worked great to tie them down, and is easy to undo later if desired. An advantage to the clothes pins is that it’s easy to clamp the tube onto the fan, then easy to un-clamp it for transport.
Cover with Mesh?
If you will be using the tube with young children, be aware that they may try to put small items into the fan openings (beans, coins, toys, etc.) I usually avoid this issue by putting the wind tube in a hallway or in a large motor play area where there just aren’t any small items to put in. But, if you’re in a classroom full of small smare parts, you may want to cover the fan so they can’t drop things into it. I bought 1.5 yards of black tulle with pretty sparkles (like this), and we wrapped it over the fan, tying it off below with a twisted pipe cleaner. The tulle does work great as safety proofing and looks fine, but it definitely does diffuse the air flow from the fan, so some of the heavier things that would fly without the mesh on just don’t fly well with the mesh on.
Play Value
I’ve watched countless children age 1 – 10 play with this for hours. The under-one-year olds love just watching things fly up and out of the tube. The two-year-olds love shoving things into the tube and watching them fly. The three-year-olds start to make observations on which items flew best. The four-and-ups experiment with building things, tying things together, trying to put things in from the top, and so on. Some of the parents get caught into the experimenting too, folding paper helicopters and such to test what will fly. The kids play really well together – part of the point of this game is to put something in and LET GO, so there aren’t many issues with having to share something that someone was holding on tight to. They all play happily side by side. They don’t really need to take turns, as it works fine to have four or five things flying at the same time.
Here’s some of the items we have launched: scarves, ribbons, pipe cleaners twisted into spirals, dixie cups, plastic dishes, and paper cut into a variety of shapes. (See more video in my Wind Tube post.) I have also flown silk leaves for a fall theme, felt snowflakes in the winter. Toy parachutes are also great – if there’s ANY chance the plastic paratrooper will get caught in the fan, just cut him off and use the parachute alone.
Alternatives to our DIY wind tube
There is a DIY wind tube tutorial on Instructables. It requires that you own real tools, which I don’t. 🙂
babbledabbledo describes building a simple “vortex” by just rolling a tube of poster board and setting it directly on the fan. Kids put a scarf or a balloon above the tube where it gets caught up in the rush of air. Super simple! I like that with our tube, the kids can put the item in at the bottom and see it travel up the tube, but this simple alternative may meet your needs just as well
Kodo Kids makes a wind tunnel that looks fabulous! And I know their materials are very high quality. I’d love to have it, but it costs $499 plus a $50 fan, versus the materials for my DIY tube are around $176 before tax. [Fan ~$55; hoops $20; acetate sheet $82; clothespins $19; optional tulle fabric.]
Or you can buy the science museum version for $13,500.
For lots of ideas for STEM enrichment activities with kids, check out my blog www.InventorsOfTomorrow.com.
We’ve built a fun science exploration tool, which we use in our Family Inventors’ Lab class.
The Exploratorium shared a project idea for building a Wind Tube. (Also check out the Kodo wind tunnel.) It’s basically a clear tube mounted over a fan. Kids can place items into the tube and see what happens. Heavy items just sit there. Lightweight items shoot out the top of the tube. Other items may float, spin, or rattle back and forth. The video at the the top of this post shows some of our initial experiments. (If you want to learn how to make a DIY wind tube, check out my next post.)
Dave Stroud says this about how kids (and adults!) play with a wind tube.
The Wind Tubes intrinsically encourage a particular type of play that helps guests experience the way science works. The intent is for guests to internalize a science based mindset – do something, measure the outcome, make changes, do something, measure the outcome, compare the outcomes, make changes, do something, measure the outcome, compare the outcomes – repeat this process until you run out of time. The user experiences the phenomena by exploring it, rather than being shown an outcome and having it explained. (Source)
I have definitely seen this in action. Toddlers and preschoolers love to launch the same items over and over. Four to five year olds start experimenting more, looking around the room and deciding what to try next! As they experiment, I hear them talking: “I wonder what this will do?” “What can I try next?” “What do you think will happen this time?” “That didn’t work, I wonder if I could combine it with this?” It’s “tinkering” at its finest! Older kids, teens, and adults enjoy engineering items to achieve different goals – lifting up heavy materials, designing a neutral buoyancy item that will float in the tube forever, or creating items that spin on their way up.
As Stroud says, this activity results in:
• Making guests [child] less reliant on “authority” to answer questions
• A higher level of engagement and deeper investigation
• Guests defining their own success and making their own meaning (user defined outcomes)
• Generating a particular category of questions such as: How can I get it to…? What if I…? Instead of: Why does it…? What makes it…?
Here are some of the experiments my family developed just in a few hours of play when we first built our tube:
Scarves. An easy peasy thing is scarves – they catch the wind so nicely, then gently flutter to the ground.
The Frisbee. (really a plastic lid) It gets caught in the air currents and will float forever. My son learned that if you put your arm over the fan to block some of the air flow, the Frisbee will sink down the tube.
Cardboard boat. This cardboard snack tray will float easily on its own. The small plastic monster will not – it’s too heavy and not aerodynamic. But, put the monster in the boat and it floats!
Parachutes. This plastic pterodactyl won’t fly even though it has wings. But, if you build it a parachute out of a plastic bag and a pipe cleaner, it soars. Note: you can also make parachutes with coffee filters or use these parachute party favors. (Amazon affiliate link)
Pipe cleaner spinner. My personal favorite is this twirled-up pipe cleaner that spins and spins as it floats in the air.
Tops. And speaking of spinning, watch these plastic tops. They don’t float, but they definitely respond to the wind!
Other materials to try: scarves, balloons, rubber gloves blown up and tied, dixie cups with coffee filter parachutes, whiffle balls, strawberry baskets, etc. I also really like these three projects… these pictures were from the wind tube activity at the Orlando Science museum.
Here is a printable template for the helicopter shown above.
Here are ideas from the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History:
As kids play, they learn hands-on about aerodynamics, wind currents, how lightweight things fly better than heavy things, but even heavy things can fly if they have a parachute or an “air ship” that can catch the wind currents. Having the ability to play hands-on with this will allow them to internalize the learning much more than when they cover all this stuff in high school physics class someday!
Challenges for Kids:
For older kids, you could make a poster to accompany this activity with challenges like these from MOTAT:
Can you build something that will leave the tunnel in a particular direction?
Can you build something that will hover above the wind tunnel?
Can you make something that spins clockwise as it rises in the tunnel?
Learn more:
If you want to read more about “transactivity” and what makes this such a cool learning activity, check out Stroud’s post: http://www.exhibitfiles.org/vertical_wind_tubes. This is a great “case study” post, which shares observations on how people play with the tubes.
Here are links to some other people’s experiments with and thoughts about Wind Tubes
Info from the Exploratorium: directions on how to make a wind tube include ideas for what materials you can “fly” in it. They have thoughts on materials to fly in the tube. There’s a debrief from facilitators, sharing their observations of how visitors played with the tubes.
Here’s a slightly different design, and observations from using it.
A few years ago, I went to one of the best birthday parties I’ve been to over my 20+ years of parenting. It was a construction site themed birthday party for a four year old boy.
When they arrived, the kids got construction helmets with their names on them (so helpful for me, as I only knew a third of the kids at the party) and construction apron / tool belts from Home Depot. (Note: you can also get 6 Construction Worker Vest with 6 Helmets pretty cheap on Amazon.)
The party was held in a community room with an easy clean floor. There were 4 stations:
The quarry – a kiddie pool filled with sand, construction trucks and little shovels; surrounded by some big storage tubs and stacked up sandbags to climb on (and a construction broom to sweep all the sand back to the quarry).
House painting – big cardboard boxes, paint, paintbrushes and rollers. Put a BIG plastic tarp and drop cloths under it for easy clean-up. (An alternative would be to draw houses on big paper to hang on the walls, and let kids paint that.)
Architects’ office – tables with architectural blueprints spread out and markers for drawing anything you want. (We later ate snack at those tables.)
And the best part: the construction site – 6 foam insulation panels, miscellaneous foam blocks from packaging, golf tees, and toy hammers (including a couple squeaky hammers).
The kids assembled a building out of them. For an hour and a half straight (!) these kids focused on this building. They were working intently, hammering non-stop, negotiating design issues with each other, re-building when there were accidental dis-assemblies of the building, problem-solving when they discovered they’d forgotten to put a door between the rooms (they solved this by putting a foam “step” on each side of the wall so they could easily step over it.) They were totally engaged in the project and the imaginary play that accompanied it. This was all self-guided by the kids. Parents rarely stepped in to offer any guidance – almost no dispute resolution was needed – the kids worked it out. And note: some of these kids knew each other in advance, but many were strangers to each other. It was the work that brought them together.
Since this party, I have replicated this house building project several times in my Inventors’ Class. You can read more about it and see more pictures at this post about our class session called If I Built a House. That post also has lots of other ideas that could be adapted for a birthday party or preschool class themed around construction, Bob the Builder, etc. We draw blueprints, excavate in the dirt, build plumbing in the water table, connect electrical circuits, and lots more.
Get Kids Building
People will often say that children this age (4 – 8) have short attention spans and are hard to entertain / control / keep focused on a task. But if you find engaging, hands-on projects and let the children guide their own creation, it’s amazing just how hard kids will work on a project and how much satisfaction they’ll get out of it.
Kids love to build. They love to be competent at a skill. They learn by using tools and by the trial and error that goes with the building process. They can work together collaboratively. We just need to come up with good projects to help them do so. And there are long-term benefits to building. (Check out:The Importance of Learning to Make Things: http://harvestamericacues.com/2014/03/10/the-importance-of-learning-to-make-things/)
Some more ideas for building projects:
Give a child scraps of wood, sand paper, glue. Hammer and nails if you’re feeling bold. Encourage them to build a boat, or a castle, or whatever inspires them.
Cardboard forts. Ask your friends for their giant cardboard boxes (the week around Christmas is a great time to post this request on your Facebook page!). Give your kids packing tape, and markers, fabric for curtains and flags and so on. Help them cut doors and windows as needed.
Building tunnels. Tape flaps on cardboard boxes open or cut flaps off so that boxes form a tunnel – string several together to be an animal den or a prison escape route or whatever pretend play the kids want to do. (There’s an amazing scene of this in the Ant Man and the Wasp movie!)
Marble runs / ball runs. Use cardboard tubes, or foam insulation cut in half, or PVC pipes and a lot of tape to build mazes to run marbles or balls through. (Learn more.)
“Paint” your house with water. In the summer, put out paint rollers, paint brushes, and paint trays of water. Let kids paint the house, the patio, the car…
Sanding wood. If you’re working on a project with wood, even small children can help with the sanding. Show them how to sand with the grain, how to touch the wood to see if it’s getting smoother, etc.
Using screws. Your child can use a screwdriver and screws – it may be easier to screw them into a bar of soap first, before trying wood.
Screwing in bolts. We have a fun toy drill driver with plastic bolts and wrench, but you could also use real bolts and a real wrench.
Construction snacks: Use materials like graham crackers or marshmallows or gingerbread. Mortar them together with cream cheese, frosting, or peanut butter. Let kids create buildings with them. Decorate with candy or dried fruit or cereal.
I loved this post on “The Educator’s Spin on It” which gave an idea for an engineering experiment to try with a preschool age child, and also included broader tips on how to build Engineer-Thinking skills in your child, book recommendations about engineering, and so on. But when I read it yesterday, I didn’t expect to try the experiment today!
Then today, we had one hour before nap-time, and needed a new idea for an activity. My son asked for fizzy science experiments, and we played for a while with vinegar and baking soda. Then he asked for a new science experiment.
I remembered the post, and said: “Let’s build a rain shelter.” We made a bunny-like object out of a paper towel and talked about how we could keep it dry. First, I asked my son how to keep dry, and his first idea was to wear a raincoat and rain pants. (He goes to an outdoor preschool in Seattle, so is well practiced in this method!) We put bunny in a ziploc bag (aka his raincoat – my son is not quite savvy enough to realize how bad a plan a ziploc would be if the bunny actually needed to breathe!). And then we ran bunny under the faucet. Sure enough the “raincoat” kept him dry.
Then we took off the raincoat, and practiced having bunny hide under a flat roof. (The lid off a bistro box from Starbucks.) That worked for a little “rain” but when we had a lot of rain the flat roof spilled over. But the “roof” we were using had “gutters”, so we cut out a section and added a straw for a downspout. (Then we had lots of chances to sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider and talk about waterspouts.) We then folded the lid in half to see the advantage of peaked roofs over flat roofs.
Then we made a “tree” out of shredded up plastic bag… that also shielded our bunny till there was just too much rain and the “ground” (the plate the bunny was on) got so wet there were big puddles that ran under the “tree” and soaked the bunny.
After that we walked around our house and looked at our gutters and rainspouts. We tracked where the rain would flow out of the spout, down the driveway, out to the road and down the street to the storm drain, and talked about how it goes to the lake from there. We looked at the flat roofs and peaked roofs in the neighborhood.
In the end, it was a fabulous hour of interactive discovery inspired by a blog post I read yesterday morning. I would have never thought of this project on my own, and am so glad that I get to benefit from the shared creativity of other educators and parents!
My son is continuing to explore the ideas of solids, liquids, and gases. (See previous post.)
Some of the lessons from our impromptu experiment have sunk in, and he’s also learning new stuff. When I pour his milk, he says “look, it’s a liquid.” When we were steaming veggies, he pointed at the steam, and said “look it’s a gas.” He wanted to set up 3 categories, so we gave him a bowl of ice for solids, a water bottle for liquids, and bubble wrap for gas. We explained there was gas trapped inside the plastic bubbles, and we had a lot of fun popping the bubbles and listening to the gas escape.
Later we came back and he was upset that his solid water was gone and there was liquid water in the bowl instead. We talked about how it was the same water, it had just changed from solid to liquid as it got warm.
I never imagined I’d be covering these topics with my three year old. How did we get here? By following his interest.
When he was two, he wanted to play trains and talk trains all day. So, we learned the names of all the types of train cars, and we learned the names of all of Thomas’ friends. Now, he’s into the planets and science, and I can tell you more facts about the solar system than I’ve ever known before.
With my oldest daughter, we followed her down the path of stories – books, plays, movies, writing – I’ve always loved musical theater, but after 20 years of engaging with her about theater, I know much more about it, and that’s only deepened my appreciation. My middle child has loved wilderness survival, soccer, theater, art, fashion design, hair color, and now vinyl LP’s from the 50s. I’ve followed her down all these paths, learning about each of these things. I love the joy of connecting over something they’re passionate, and love the opportunity to learn alongside them, and appreciate things I may or may not have ever explored on my own. (Yeah, types of train cars…. I never would have learned that on my own!)
A side benefit: I know kids learn more when they’re happy, and learn basic skills (like language) more quickly when we use that basic skill to explore something that’s important to them.
For our Family Inventors’ Lab class (a STEM class for preschool and kindergarten age), we have built a fun tool, which encourages the kids to tinker – see my last post for how kids play with a wind tube. This post is about the tinkering process we used to build and refine our DIY wind tube.
with their names on them (so helpful for me, as I only knew a third of the kids at the party) and construction 
pretty cheap on Amazon.)
(including a couple s
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