Here’s a super exciting DIY to make your artwork move! Let’s create gears and use them to help animate our work of art. Gears are used to help mechanisms move faster, slower, or change direction. Let’s go ahead and see how the gears are going to help us with this activity. Go ahead and watch the marvellous mechanics winding gears activity below!
Parental Involvement: Medium
Duration: 45 minutes
Skills Acquired: Cognitive, Creativity, Play
Materials
- Cardboard
- Coloured paper
- A pair of scissors
- Sketch pen
- Ruler
- Pencil
- Board pins
- Compass
- Glue
Instructions for Marvellous Mechanics Winding Gears Activity
- Using your compass, draw a circle on your cardboard and draw another circle within it.
- Repeat the above step, but make your circle a little smaller.
- In the space between the two circles, using a ruler, mark eight even sections. (Refer to video above)
- Use a sketch pen to draw the cogs on the circles.
- Repeat the same for the smaller circle. Cut out your gears
- On a cardboard strip that is 1 inch wide, draw a rectangle.
- Using your gear wheel as a template, draw gear teeth on the rectangle and cut it out. (Refer to video above)
- Using glue, stick a smaller strip of cardboard on the cardboard with teeth.
- Secure your two gear wheels on a cardboard with a board pin.
- Place the strip of cardboard with teeth by the gear wheels.
- Use a strip of cardboard to hold the strip of cardboard with teeth in place. (Refer to video above)
- On coloured paper, draw and cut out a tree and bird (or anything of your choice).
- Stick the images on the cardboard. (Refer to video above)
Your winding gears are done!
You can replace the bird and tree with boats and fish or anything you want to see move! You can take this up a notch and try adding one more gear wheel with a drawing! Try experimenting and playing with the sizes and number of gear wheels.
Activity done by Vishwajeet