Surprise! a Guest Blogger! (very exciting!)

today's post is written by Wolf Pup - the small, intrepid human who chooses to subject himself to my rearing, which, if you hadn't guessed already, is rather questionable.  moving forward with that assumption, we borrowed from the library a wonderful little book entitled Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction, which leads to our guest post today:

"My favorite weapon that I made during this unit is the Z-gun (figure 1) because I modified the design for the materials I had.  I liked building the #2 crossbow (figure 2) because I felt like I was a blacksmith building a real crossbow.  The coin shooter (figure 3) fired the farthest because the balloon was very strong.  the #2 catapult (figure 4) didn't do as well as the others because it didn't have as much firing power with the nut I used for ammunition, but with a cotton ball it was fine.  I like all of my mini weapons of mass destruction because they are awesome!  But the bean shooter (figure 5) is highly dangerous and always wear safety glasses!  During a zombie attack my Z-gun might come in handy, if I remember to bring lots of ammo."

Z-gun (figure 1)

#2 crossbow (figure 2)

coin shooter (figure 3)

#2 catapult (figure 4)

bean shooter (figure 5)

clothespin catapult

simple crossbow

this is a chart I made showing how far each weapon fired.  red is the lowest, yellow is the middle, and blue is the farthest.  some of the weapons would have fired farther, but the target was at the 6' mark.  the only shots that went farther than 6' are ones that missed the target.

yay, fun!

so, there you have it.  a successful unit study on projectiles based on the twisted imagination of one Macgyver-type dude, John Austin.  some of the little weapons fired better than others, and some were harder to construct than others (some breaking repeatedly due to excessive rubber band stress), but they were all made with items we had around the house.  after these seven weapons were completed, we went outside on a beautiful sunny day to set up our zombie target and tape measure for 'ranged-weapons testing', which was a great deal of fun.  now we're saving up cardboard to build a castle to besiege with hickory nuts.  I'm so buying this book for Hannukah!