As a fun pre-thanksgiving team building activity we came up with “Gratitude Gears”. The idea is you could print out as many gears as needed on paper, all at the same exact size. The gear design is from a Rev 20DP 16T gear. They should properly interlock if cut out well and actually rotate each other if done on thick enough material.
Team members can each fill out the empty space (avoid the exact middle for the axle) with what they are grateful for, this could be:
- New friends on the team
- New skills learned
- Memory at a meeting or off season event
- Personal milestones
- Etc.
They write their names on the bottom line. Then you could glue it to a cardboard sheet(optional) to make it thicker and sturdier and cut it out. Use dowel rods, a foam base plate (to jam the dowels into) and place them so they all interconnect and rotate properly. The cardboard edge might be thick enough to grab the others and actually turn it. This is limited by friction, alignment and the number of gears in the chain.
We also thought about using pegboard as the base plate but have not done this yet so we do not have a good known print size to get it perfectly aligned.
If you don’t want to do real axles you could punch holes on the left and right rim edges and use yarn, paper clips, etc to link them together like a banner and hang it up.
We will be doing this tomorrow but wanted to get the file out there for people meeting tonight or later this week. We will share our end result.
Edit: We may end up using a scrollsaw or two to cut them out on thin wood if we get our supplies in order for tomorrow. Any ideas and feedback gladly welcome. This will be our first time trying this idea out. Really trying to encourage the A in STEAM this year.
