What floats your boat? This event makes learning fun
Waterloo’s Open Streets fest promotes playing … and socializing, too
WATERLOO — Threatening clouds and some rain drops didn’t stop people from coming out for the Open Streets festival in Waterloo on Sunday.
A top attraction was a boat-building experiment at Waterloo Public Square.
Using corks for flotation, Popsicle sticks for the structure and elastic bands for lashing, children and adults had fun constructing boats and testing them on a man-made river.
On board each boat was a plastic lizard. The goal was to keep the lizard’s head dry on a perilous journey around twists and turns and over a waterfall. The river runs at more than 20,000 litres an hour. At certain points, the water moves about 60 km/h.
Builders can strap the lizard in with a seatbelt.
“He’s dry and he survived!” Mike Ford, 38, of Kitchener announced after acing it on his first try.
Eight-year-old Arthur Ripley, of Kitchener, was asked how his boat fared. “Bad,” he said. But his father, Drew, said his son had made some modifications and had improved.
“The whole idea of this is you do modify because the first attempt you don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Drew, an artist. “You experiment and learn.”
Drew is helping build a new river with Cam Turner, owner of Tinker Truck, which runs the boat-building experiment. Turner said all participants win. “It’s a neat science experiment,” he said. “Everyone can participate, right down to the two- and three-year-olds.
“There’s really no right or wrong answer in the end because the wrong answer would be not participating in the first place. The right answer is learning something, whether you get it right or not.”
Participants take their boat home.
Turner, former engineering director at Kitchener e-learning company Desire2Learn, now called D2L, started Tinker Truck two years ago.
“We do the river, we do rockets, we do 3D printing and modelling, we do electrified artwork,” he said. “We go to schools, libraries, festivals. We help run school science fairs.”
The river is the most popular attraction. Only about 15 per cent of people manage to keep the lizard dry on their first attempt.
“People who have done it before know the tricks, but that’s few and far between,” Turner said. “I can build a boat that passes the test in five minutes. I’ve seen all the tricks.”
He tells a reporter the top trick, but asks that it not be published.
“It’s a state secret,” he said with a laugh.
Tinker Truck employee Kristina Foster, who also used to work at Desire2Learn, said the river was also a hit at Waterloo’s Royal Medieval Faire.
The goal was to see how many gold pieces could be carried on a boat.
Some University of Waterloo engineering students gave it a whirl, but the winner was a young girl, who loaded up 107 gold pieces. “That was cool,” Foster said. Other activities at Open Streets, which promotes playing and socializing, included cycling courses, music, a giant Connect Four game, martial arts demonstrations and the creation of a giant poem in chalk on a trail.
The next Open Streets festival in Waterloo is set for July 16 from noon to 5 p.m.