Clockworks

William’s class has been studying timekeeping for the past few weeks. For homework, they were asked to research ways in which people kept track of time before modern clocks were invented. In addition, they were to try to make a 60-second timer. With the limited amount of craft supplies on hand, William made “gravity” timers. The first one was made with two plastic water bottles connected neck to neck, and couscous as the mobile phase. In theory, the mobile phase would flow from one bottle to the next in exactly 60 seconds. It worked pretty well, but we hypothesized that the uneven shape of the couscous pieces might be affecting the precision. He made another one in which sand (from the Rakaia River Gorge) was used. This one turned out to be less accurate! Hmmm... time for a new hypothesis.

In class, I’ve been helping the students construct stylized clocks of their own design. So far the students have: chosen whether they would be making a wall clock or a table clock, drawn their designs, created patterns, cut the pieces out of cardboard, assembled their clocks, and applied paper mache to hold the whole thing together. They will be finishing up soon by painting the clocks, adding decorative bits made out of polymer clay, and finally attaching the purchased clock mechanism. The students have made some remarkable creations. In these pictures below, you can see Ms. Dunlop giving instructions to the whole class about how to add 3-D detail to the face of the clocks and a close-up of William’s work in progress. He was very wise in his design and planned one that was not very large (so we can bring it home!). It’s going to be a great memento of his time at Beckenham.