Skip to content

Tag: Toys

Powered Paddleboat

Leave a Comment

I’ve deliberately kept the designs for the “machines” in Marvellous Machines very basic for two main reasons: 1) I want to make it as easy as possible for you to make a working machine so you can play and experiment with it, and 2) I want you to experience the satisfaction of improving the machines for yourself. The “powered paddleboat” is perhaps the best example of this in the book – it shows how a paddleboat mechanism can be made, but it does not work very well. This was very… Read more Powered Paddleboat →

Paper Pinwheel

Leave a Comment

I was at the seaside last week and these were on sale in many of the shops. They’re invariably made of plastic and I suspect many of them end up in bins within a couple of days. The much more environmentally friendly design shown in this video is really straightforward to make (although you might need to fiddle a bit with the drawing pin), and would be easy to modify to make something more permanent, say, for a garden decoration. Like many of the activities in the book, I’ve deliberately… Read more Paper Pinwheel →