105: Blocks and Ping-Pong balls

The title photo, as well as the videos I will hopefully figure out how to embed, are from my freshman year of high school, which was so long ago, but seeing them reminded me of my long-lasting love of building stuff, so I'm going to yap about those instead of talking about today, because today was mid.

Backstory time: My school district had a thing they called the GTI, or "Granite Technical Institute", where you could take career-focused classes, like dentistry, firefighting, plumbing, stuff like that. The classes were offered as half-days, with busses from all of the high schools in the district leaving at the beginning of the day, lunch (which was halfway) and then at the end of the day, back to the origin high school. I took one of these classes my freshman year, a combination of a rudimentary intro to engineering course, which I loved, and a "Physics with technology" class, which was just high school physics with really nice lab equipment.

The intro to engineering class I will honestly credit with my understanding of what I wanted to do long-term (I took a more focused Electrical Engineering class the following year, also at the GTI, which was honestly amazing). The physics class was fun, but really just checked off the requirement for me, which is fine.

The photo above is actually neither of those things, instead a photo of my high school's library, with a big ol' contraption of what were called Keva Planks, if I remember correctly, formed into a rudimentary marble run for the ping pong balls we were given. The GTI always got us back to school a little bit early (high school got out at 2:10, but the bus from the GTI usually got back at 1:50 or so, so we had a little time to kill). I could have fully just walked home, and I did sometimes, but I mostly used that time to hang out with friends I had made on the bus, some from my classes, and some taking other things. We built probably dozens of these contraptions in the library, and the librarians were very courteous in keeping them protected from the riffraff so that we could work on them for multiple days. The one in the title photo is likely the fruit of a couple week's labor.

After watching a few of the videos below, I also remembered that a few of us would spend our lunch in the library, building with blocks rather than eating, and just eat in our previous or next class, which is when a lot of the collaborative work got done, since lunch was a solid 35 minutes every day, which is enough for quite a bit of block-building.

This is somewhat of a core memory for me, honestly, I loved building these little marble runs with my friends, and we had a ton of fun coming up with new and ever more creative things to do with the blocks.

Here's a video of this half of the run, the full contraption is actually two interlinked runs, and I have another video of the other side. The runs aren't truthfully that impressive, especially not compared to my current capabilities and technological access, but I have a ton of nostalgia for these kinds of blocks and builds, they were always something I enjoyed doing, especially with others.

Here's the video of the other half. This was a massive group effort, and it's been 7 years (yikes), so I fully don't remember who did what, but it was just so fun.

That same kind of collaborative creation feeling is what I get out of Wind Power, and it's honestly something I will be chasing my entire life.

Here's a selection of some of our other builds, but I actually have almost no photos from that period in my life, and that was covid year, so we were sent home 3/4 of the way through it.

I think, were it not for Covid, I would have stayed much closer to these people, because the trend obviously died entirely with the move to online school, and then wasn't ever picked back up, by us or by anyone else, as far as I know.