Cartooning Jams and Solar Toys

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hanging out with about 80 people of all ages, 40 at a time, at two different libraries. We were holding Cartooning Jams, where kids and grownups get together and make drawings and characters and flippies (like the Captain Underpants Flip-O-Rama) and more. Both classes were great fun and very noisy and silly.

After the second class, I got to hang out a bit with Brad, an 86-year-old gentleman who has filled the back of his Honda Insight with solar-powered toys.

Here's a picture of the trunk of his car. The blue thing is one of those M&M characters, with a spinning thing on top of his head. It was partly cloudy, so every time the sun would come out or hit something new things would start moving.



I even took a super-short movie so you can see it all moving. People would stop and stare at all this cool shiny solar stuff. I think folks at the library are quite familiar with Brad. Brad is determined to educate as many kids as possible about solar energy. He even has a little sun pin fastened to the front of his baseball cap.



This has me thinking about trying to make a solar-powered zoetrope. Brad showed me how the little photovoltaic cells hook up to motors and make things go. Just think - if you made a zoetrope (cylinder with slits that plays a movie when it spins) and hooked it up to a cell, you could play a solar-powered movie! Hmmm.

Anyway thanks Brad for showing me all your cool inventions, and thanks everybody for coming to the Jams. Every class is new and different territory, and I so enjoy meeting everyone.