STEM activities: Making small stuff huge

Giant art, household challenges, and building the Jurassic Park T-Rex

Jun 06, 2020

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Hi! I’m journalist Caroline Delbert and this is The Toolkit from Robotics & Beyond 501(c)3. Our goal every week is to give you some videos, projects, and products that help kids (and parents) get inspired by science, technology, engineering, math, and creative design.

This week in issue 5 we’re going to talk about big things. For all our videos, regular things go BIG and demonstrate interesting challenges of scaling up. (Literally, for the dragons.) I’d like you to think about different ways you could make big versions of everyday things. What if you used paper towel tubes as a stem and made a huge plant with giant paper leaves? I like this cake from an episode of Great British Baking Show (a great, very family friendly Netflix show), which baker Frances Quinn made to look just like a sandwich — but giant.

Short List:

Ages 5-8: Big Art Attack
Ages 8-12: Giant household objects
Ages 12-15: Building the Jurassic Park t-rex
Bonus: A moving 15-foot kookaburra model

Why Do We Like Big Stuff?

Something cool about the universe is that there’s always something bigger to find. Earth is reasonably sized and, sure, it’s nice for living on. But Jupiter is so big that 1,300 Earths could fit inside, and the largest of its known 67 moons, Ganymede, is bigger than Mercury. Towering Mt. Fuji has inspired art for at least a thousand years. The Sears Tower is so tall that its foundation rests on the bedrock deep under Chicago.

Some big things are practical. The Sears Tower is a marvel, but it’s also a fully equipped office and residential building in a great location. Russia has huge, nuclear-powered icebreaker ships that help move goods through the frozen Arctic Ocean. Fortresses around the world are mostly tourist attractions today, but their large size helped to fend off invading armies. The classic Jumbotron turned sporting events into multimedia spectacles.

And some big things are just for fun, for art, and for accomplishment. When I was in school, I got to join an annual art project in my hometown where we spent the day stamping down grass in a fallow field to make, well, crop circles—but nicer. In the moment, we just followed the guideposts and worked together to mash the grass down. Later, when we saw aerial photographs, our work on the ground came together into a whole picture. (I told you my art teacher was the best! You can see that group and some sample field art here, but my year predates Facebook.)

Ages 5-8: Art Attack: A Bicycle and Chinese Dragon (4 min)

Art Attack was a long-running British children’s show, and host Neil Buchanan did a few projects in each episode. I’m so happy to dig up two examples from the “Big Art Attack” segments he did in almost every episode, where, like my group in the field, he turns simple things like pouring lentils or driving a car into a big picture you can see from above. (There are other episodes of this show available on YouTube, and a revival series began for Disney in 2011.)

Ages 8-12: Make a Really Really Big Version of Something That is Usually Quite Small (15 min)

Taskmaster is a chaotic and wonderful British show where comedians compete to do absurd tasks and receive points. During the pandemic, they’ve made “Home Tasks” where people film themselves and submit their version to be judged. In this one, everyone has to make a large version of something small like a TV remote or toothbrush, and their large version still has to work. I love all the different ways people made their objects “work”! (Taskmaster is an incredible show and one of my favorite things, but be warned that the real show has some adult language. There are five full seasons on their YouTube channel, with a sixth in progress.)

Ages 12-15: Building the Animatronic Jurassic Park T-Rex (13 min)

This is a very cool documentary (in three short parts) from the Stan Winston Studio, which designed and built the iconic animatronic Tyrannosaurus rex used in Jurassic Park. Even though the resulting dinosaur is technically a special effect in the movie, their design process mimics how robots are built even now. Our programming is much more sophisticated, but physical objects still must be carefully thought up, made, and operated. Today’s equivalent may be Tradinno, a remote controlled dragon robot that won the Guinness World Record for largest walking robot in 2014. Check Tradinno out in this demo video.