Connect Legos and Tinkertoys

07/30/2012

Success in life comes not from having the right cards, but from playing bad ones properly.
Joshua Dool

With Exchange's Learning Moments series, you see video clips of preschool children in classroom settings playing around with all types of loose parts — blocks, sticks, balls, pails — and observe how teachers react to these activities. Forbes (April 23, 2012; forbes.com) describes a parent, Carnegie Mellon professor Golan Levin, watching his son trying to use both Tinkertoys and K'Nex to make a vehicle. This intrigued Golan, who set out to design a way to connect construction toys of various.

He succeeded in creating a "Free Universal Construction Kit" which provides adapters between ten popular construction toys — Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K’Nex, Krinkles (Bristle Blocks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob.

And, to sweeten the deal, Levin released, for free, a set of digital blueprints that a 3-D printer can use to create more than 45 plastic adapters. You can learn more about the Free Universal Construction Kit and download the blueprints for free at the Free Art and Technology website (http://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/).

Also, frustrated golfers in the crowd will enjoy, "Go for it Golfing (http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2012/0423/life-sports-national-golf-foundation-go-for-it.html," in the same issue of Forbes in which our children's childhood chum, Michael Dugan shares insights to "make the world's least fun game a little bit more entertaining."

Music making in the outdoor classroom - Schoolscapes Inc.

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