Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (32 page)

O
ne of the finest things for a dad to share with his kid is the tradition of the practical joke. But since we are geeky parents, we won’t debase ourselves with the tired jokes like the old flaming bag of dog poop on the doorstep. Rather, GeekDad practical jokes must include one very key ingredient to be worthy of our time and effort: science! Which is why this next project is for the geek in all of us.

Culled from the wilds of the Internet, this project/joke is based on the now (in)famous Diet Coke and Mentos reaction where some strange and wonderful interaction between the chalky hard candy and the carbonized beverage makes for an amazingly quick release of saturated CO
₂
from the soda. But what the careful, scientific study performed by the MythBusters has taught us (episode #57) is that, while there is a chemical in Diet Coke that makes the reaction extra spectacular, we can get a similar, if slightly muted, effect from almost any carbonated soda.

The concept is simple: We’ll make a time-release system so that the Mentos/soda reaction comes as a complete surprise to the victim of our joke. To achieve this, we just freeze the Mentos into cubes of ice. Actually, this is the trickiest part of the project (but not all that tricky). Fill your ice tray with water. Use only tap water, not distilled or filtered, because we want the ice cubes to be fairly opaque so as to hide the explosive contents. Put the tray into the freezer, and wait.

Give it about 10 minutes, and check to see if the freezing process has started. Almost always, ice cubes in trays freeze from the outside in. When you see a shell has formed on the top of your ice cubes, but they haven’t frozen all the way through, you’re ready. Use something like a butter knife to crack the top shell of the ice cube, and put one Mentos candy into the still-liquid interior of each cube. Top off the cubes with more water if needed, and return to the freezer to finish the extraction of heat energy. In about 30 minutes (depending on your freezer and how full it is), they should be ready.

Because of its volatile nature, this joke is probably best suited for the outdoors. Pick your victim, pour him the soda of choice (and hope he’ll really want a Diet Coke, for the best fireworks possible), plop a special cube or two into the drink, and get the video camera ready (though far enough away to avoid splashing). YouTube and/ or your child’s therapist are waiting to see the hilarity that ensues!

T
he best-laid plans of mice and GeekDads oft go awry, someone sort of said once. That’s at least, if not more, true for the GeekDad who wants to design and build cool, geeky projects with his kid. And while working out a detailed design and layout for a project in advance is always a good idea, it doesn’t always guarantee success. That’s no reason not to try, though, and as we all know (anecdotally at least) we learn as much or more from failure as we do from success.

Which is why this project is included as an afterword. We failed at this project. It didn’t work, and though I imagine someone could pull it together, we couldn’t at the time, so decided to move on. However, we did walk away from it with something valuable.

I am not suggesting you try to build this project knowing that it will fail. It will fail if you follow what I did as described here. It was a fun idea that I thought I’d be able to develop into a cool, geeky, science-based construct with a wow factor for the kids. But it didn’t work, for reasons those with a slightly better grasp of pneumatics will probably be able to easily describe. However, I’m going to use this project as a good excuse to discuss the value of failure as a learning tool, so please bear with me.

My older son plays Little League baseball, and it seemed to me that a cool idea would be to build some kind of neato baseball cannon for fun and practice. I had visions of hooking up some kind of PVC tube construct to my compressor and launching baseballs hundreds of feet into the air for some righteous outfield practice. I started doing some research on the Internet to find out who had done what before me, and learned that most of the work in this field has been done with more . . . explosive means toward launching the projectiles.

There were some versions using compressed air, however. The problem was that they all tended to use expensive valves and pressure chambers, which put the project out of the specs I was trying to keep all the GeekDad projects within. I needed to take a step back and reevaluate the project.

One day, watching my son at practice, I noticed that while they used regular baseballs for most of their drills, there was another kind they used in some cases. A lightbulb (LED) went on over my head: I’d build a Wiffle ball launcher!

Wiffle balls are so much lighter; I figured I could do something with manual compression. My boys and I went down to the local big-box home improvement store and dug through all the pipe and fitting they had. We returned home with 3-inch PVC, 4-inch and 6-inch drainpipe, a couple of rubber reducers, and, would you believe it, a toilet plunger. The concept was that I would build a compression chamber out of the larger pipe, which would reduce down to the 3-inch pipe. A Wiffle ball would be loaded into the 3-inch pipe and rest at its base on screws that had been drilled inward. The plunger fit just about perfectly into the 6-inch pipe and, the idea went, if you pushed the plunger upward quick enough, it would build enough pressure through the reducers to launch the Wiffle ball a significant height.

Yeah, well . . .

It was a complete failure. Being a civil engineer, I may have a basic grasp of certain areas of physics, but obviously my pneumatics needed updating. The boys and I were undaunted, though (well, maybe lightly daunted), because I had a fallback. I still had a compressor to work with.

We took apart most of the original build and instead devised something with a forechamber sealed mostly with duct tape. It had a small hole through which I could poke the end of the hand valve from the compressor’s hose. With about 60 psi built up, it couldn’t fail.

And again, so much for my memory of college physics. The Wiffle ball did actually make it out of the tube, but it flew in a very low arc, just a couple feet, and bounced on the ground. It was underwhelming, to say the least. I looked at my boys, they looked at me, and we all started laughing.

Time, and the cost of materials, made trying anything else prohibitive, so I asked them whether they were okay with calling it a fail. They were. They told me we’d tried our best, we’d improvised, explored the possibilities, but just couldn’t make it work. And then they ran off to play with their buddy from across the street.

So I apologize to everyone reading this book who may have turned to this chapter, looking for a cool project to launch projectiles. It isn’t here. I do firmly believe that it can be done, and probably in some way that’s not too far off from what we tried. With another couple weeks of research on the Internet and fine-tuning a design, we probably could have made it work. But we couldn’t, and it didn’t, and that’s okay. We tried, and we learned—both about what wouldn’t work and about the necessary humility in any project where you’re making it up from scratch. And I’m actually glad my boys and I could share that.

To make the long story just a little longer, my point is this: Be ready to fail. Indeed, when it comes, embrace failure as the learning experience it usually is. Don’t get angry. Don’t pound the workbench. Don’t let your frustration get any bigger than a shake of the head and a rueful laugh. Show your geeklet that failure isn’t an end but rather just another step toward ultimate success. Because patience and determination are vital components to the geek personality, and teaching that to your kids is as valuable a project as anything else in this book.

T
he instructions for the projects in this book are intended as a starting point for creativity and customization rather than a comprehensive guide. If you’re interested in more information, and in sharing your variations on the projects in this book, the first place to go online is
www.geekdadbook.com
, where there are project pages and forums set up with an active, moderated community seeking to explore all the possibilities. Furthermore, the resources for many of the projects represented here are available online, and there are also alternative instructions on other Web sites. This appendix collects a list of links for each project to help you and your geeklets get as much as possible out of your creative experience.