Here are three fun and easy Mechanical Engineering activities For Kids that can turn into home STEM projects, elementary school STEM curriculum or engineering science fair projects. MechAnimations develops engineering ideas about force, motion, structures, mechanisms, levers and linkages. Fantastic Elastic provides an engaging introduction to energy, showing that energy is conserved, and how it can be stored and then transformed from potential to kinetic energy. Flip Toys illustrates lever principles as well as concepts of tension and gravity.
MechAnimations are home-made mechanisms that can illustrate the actions of animals, people or scenes. Children make these devices from ordinary carboard, held together with paper fasteners. The first objects they create may not be mechanisms at all – instead these objects may be structures, which have no moving parts! As they begin to create mechanisms, they learn about inputs and outputs, pivots, levers and links. By operating an input, they make something move at an output. They relate the operation of these constructions to mechanisms in their own environments, which include devices found in the kitchen, bathroom and desk, such as salad tongs, nail clippers and scissors. And this is the what’s so useful in these Mechanical Engineering activities For Kids.
In Fantastic Elastic, children make wind-up toys powered by rubber bands. A wind-up toy can be made from a cup, one or two paper plates or plastic lids, a stick, a bead, and a paper clip, as well as a rubber band. When you wind it up by turning the stick, you are storing potential energy in the rubber band. By letting it go, you are converting the potential energy into kinetic energy. This can not be the only energy transformation involved in a wind-up, because energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Where do you get the energy to wind up the rubber band in the first place? What happens to the kinetic energy of the wind-up as it slows down and then stops? These are all interesting questions that highlight the principles of energy conservation and transformation.
A Flip Toy is a toy that is common in Latin America, where it goes by the names trapecista, acrobata or salto de muerte. You can make a flip toy from two rulers, some cardboard or a plastic bottle top, string, tape, a clothespin and craft materials. Squeezing the two wooden handles causes a small figure, the acrobat, to do a complete somersault. The wooden handles are levers that apply tension to a loop of string. The tension in the string forces the acrobat to jump up, and releasing the handles allows gravity to make him drop down.