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Panacea Newsletter 8

Well things are quite interesting down here.

The boys have been very busy during the first half of this term and have produced some really interesting things. Firstly Connor has designed and made a tabletop pool table which took a lot of thought and patience to achieve.The result looked quite professional. Lewis has also shown a lot of patience when working on his Wave Rider electronic hand steady game. It required a lot of soldering into the circuit and the circuit diagram was complicated with transistors and resistors,switches and LEDs to solder into it.After a few false starts it eventually worked!

Jacob and Barkis have been whittling sticks. Jacob has whittled his into a letter opener and has shown considerable skill in shaping it.He has learned how to use the cutting knife properly and how to execute specific cuts to achieve the right effect. Barkis skills were less exact and his stick landed up in small, wet pieces!

Josh assembled a hovercraft which he tested out on the river.it sped around madly and Josh had little control of where it went but it worked! He is now carefully making an old style pickup lorry which requires working with metal and wood and a variety of tools.

Robbie is constructing a safe which has an electronic code control on it. Gradually he has assembled the mechanism and has the complex circuit to work on next. He enjoyed a visit from Marko who showed Robbie some animal skeletons, a snake skin,a crocodile tooth and other interesting artefacts. We used the digi microscope to get high magnification photos of them and of some caddisfly larvae.With the digi microscope it is possible to save the photos to file and also print out copies.

Dated: 2012-02-08 and Updated: 0000-00-00