Nature's Inspiration

    Over the past weekend, I volunteered at Herndon Fortnightly Library again. This time, we focused on getting inspiration for designs based on animals in real life. Lots of scientists and researchers are able to invent new theories and inventions by observing nature. For example, the first airplane was modeled after a bird! The most important concept isn’t to simply observe the animal anatomy and reproduce it, but to understand why the anatomic feature works and use it to create an original design. I brought pictures of different animals' claws and paws since the final task was to be able to grab a plush ball. The kids could choose from a variety of lizard, cat and bird paws/claws to draw and try to figure out how it worked. After they got a good sense of the mechanics, they had to figure out how to implement their design practically. The main focus of this section was exercising the kids’ creativity and to try to get them to come up with their own original design. Overall, everybody had tons of fun drawing and building from scratch! 

This is an example of how to break down a bird’s claw and figure out its mechanics. This diagram goes in detail with many different types of bird claws such as heterodactyl (2 talons in front, 2 talons in the back), syndactyly (3 talons in front, 1 talon in the back) and pamprodactyl (4 talons in front) claws.