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Bobs [soylentnews.org] writes:

Hi Soylentils,

  I am looking for ideas for an extended summer project for a handful of kids from 10 - 15 while they are out of school.

  Ideally researching, designing, building something that does something interesting.

  Kids are relatively nerdy, well-read, with some interest and/or experience with programing, aviation, robots, chemistry, Estes-rockets, Lego-Mindstorms, rocks, electricity, tanks, black holes

  I have a few ideas below but I imagine that you all can come up with and/or have stories about interesting projects built by kids.

Some ideas I have come up with:

• Build a decent-sized trebuchet
• Program Lego-based "battle-bots"
• Build a floating, thermite-detonator
• An R/C blimpy, drone launcher
• Build a large 'ball-machine' out of PVC tubes.
• Geo-caching?

Contraints:
  - should take 20-80 hours to complete,
  - should be interactive / engaging / interesting once completed,
  - needs to allow at least 2 groups to work in a parallel,
  - should cost less than $500,
  - should take some thought, not just time and effort,
  - better if involves a more activity than just sitting at a computer.

Based upon your experience, what have you done or think would be fun to do?

Thanks for any ideas.

Original Submission