Welcome to SciencetoyMaker!
You have found the non-commercial site for people who like to roll up their sleeves and make science toys and projects. You won’t find slick web pages here–more like the digital equivalent of a messy workshop. If you poke around, though, you’ll find good stuff. Science toy maker is a resource for inspired teachers, parents, teenagers, kids, home schoolers, science fair participants and citizen scientists everywhere.
All science toys and projects:
- are accessible (so cheap to make that nobody is excluded because of cost, and they don’t require special skills, tools, materials, or work facilities beyond perhaps a kitchen).
- have clear step by step video directions or text instructions with lots of pictures.
Most project instructions have been improved by helpful feedback from people like you, and some projects are entirely the work of guest authors.
Great reviewed links to other high-quality science project sites here.
About Slater
I am Slater Harrison. Slater is usually a last name; but it is an ancestral last name that was recycled into my first name. After college, my wife and oldest daughter (an infant at the time) and I lived in the beautiful country of Bangladesh. I worked as an engineer for small-scale village manufacturing projects. It was there that I learned to use creativity to solve problems when the tools and materials that I wanted were not available. You can see the ingenuity with which people live in Bangladesh here.
When I returned to Pennsylvania I became a middle school and high school technology teacher for almost 3 decades. My students made interactive exhibits for a local children’s museum. We also hosted younger kids to teach them about technology.I left teaching when health issues made it impossible to maintain the all-day energy level that my students deserve, although I do volunteer for half-days still.
In 2017, having raised our kids to adulthood, my wife Naomi looked at the website, rolled up her sleeves and—one sprawling page at time—reorganized/updated it to WordPress. She also runs the Facebook page. And my daughter helps us with the most challenging technical issues.
Less than 1% of my good ideas reach fruition as project on this site. When I develop science toys and I have trouble, my strategy is less about solving problems than about wearing them out! I’m not smart enough to just figure things out in my head, but I experiment relentlessly. First the experiments just raise more questions than they answer, but eventually projects reveal their secrets. I complain about how long it takes to develop projects; but the truth is that I’m as happy a duck in a pond when I’m experimenting. “Empirical” and “serendipity” are my two favorite words. I immensely enjoy hearing from people. Some projects have robust feedback (Walkalong Glider Gallery, Pop Pop Boat Gallery).
We manufacture and sell a few products that are unavailable elsewhere. (Walkalong Glider Store, Dragonfly Helicopter Store). There's been a recent change to where the money from sales goes. For more than a decade all money from sales went directly (through PayPal) to the Physics Factory (Ithaca branch), a scrappy, mostly volunteer non-profit science education organization that supports Physics Bus and the Free Science Workshop. Starting July 2024 that is no longer the case--for a positive reason, I think. Now money is going to buying parts for equipment with the goal of increasing efficiency and scaling up production.
For example, I have to cut enormous blocks of EPS foam into smaller billets--by hand on an old door made into a table. It's very labor intensive and frustrating because it's not always as accurate as I'd like. I am ordering parts to make a giant CNC for that. Also, although I already cut the thin slices of foam on a homemade CNC, I'm gearing up for the next iteration that will be able to slice thousands of sheets per day.
I think this will allow me to lower prices. I've never advertised. Either people happen upon my website or discover it through word of mouth. With lower prices and scaled-up production—in conjunction with much more user-friendly instructions and designs—I think many more young people will be able to experience this beautiful hands-on flying science project.
All of this is probably an 18 month or 2 year project, but now you know what your money is doing when you buy ScienceToyMaker products. Thank you!
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