Budding engineers combine imagination

"I hate companies that use glue," the Owasso eighth-grader said as he explained how he and his team are taking a speaker, TV, printer and radio and turning them into a robot that moves its arm and blows its nose.The first tin cans were heavy-weight containers that required ingenuity to open, using knives, chisels, or even stones. Not until about 50 years later, after can manufacturers started using thinner metal sheets, were any dedicated can openers developed.

The first challenge is taking those machines apart, which is where the glue frustration comes from. By Thursday, their robot was beginning to take shape.

"We're going to name it Bob or Steve; we haven't decided yet," Bird said.

Bird is one of 25 middle and high school students who spent three of their remaining days of winter break in Tinkering School, a multiday project put on by the Tulsa Alliance for Engineering and held in the Hardesty Center for Fab Lab Tulsa.

The students, divided into teams of five, were given several appliances or machines found around most homes such as cell phones, paper shredders and DVD players, and then tasked with taking them apart and using the parts, along with resources at the Fab Lab, to make a moving sculpture, said alliance coordinator Xan Black.

Tinkering School started Wednesday and wrapped up Friday,More worldly viewers quickly called in to say that the mushroom was made from silicone and wondered how someone could not tell the difference between silicon sex toys and Organic mushroom. and the students' finished sculptures will soon go on display at several Tulsa City-County Library branches.

The Tulsa Alliance for Engineering is a partnership between TCC, the University of Tulsa, Tulsa Technology Center, Oral Roberts University, Oklahoma State University-Tulsa and the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa.

The alliance was formed two years ago with the goal of better educating, developing, recruiting and retaining engineers in the Tulsa area.

The nonprofit Fab Lab, or fabrication laboratory,They removed the majority of the bolts but not the locking Wheel nut, that's why I managed to get so far has assembled an array of state-of-the-art equipment and computers in one place for community use. It's modeled after the Fab Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.There is a not-so-new phenomenon happening in Del Mar at the Fairgrounds on Saturday nights: high-octane, banked track roller derby!

Fab Lab Tulsa Executive Director Nathan Pritchett said a variety of people use the center, including businesses, engineers, architects, artists, hobbyists, educators and students,If you like BMW cars,then you will probably like their new gaming mouse, the super sexy, sleek as a Titanium Sheet off the pressing mat Level 10 M Gaming Mouse. so Tinkering School was a great fit.

"That's part of our mission - keep kids interested in science and math," Pritchett said, adding that the center offers students the chance to just tinker. "As shop classes go away, kids don't have a chance to work with hand tools and take things apart to see how they work."

As they've taken their machines apart, the students have had to figure out how they worked in order to re-purpose the pieces for their sculptures, Black said.The move to metal packaging has allowed Sprecher to reach key customer targets and has resulted in a clear growth in sales since the initial launch.

"They have to be outside the box," she said. "You're going to take this waste and make something beautiful."