Planning

The first step in building my new lab was modeling how I was going to arrange my Ikea shelving to provide a decent working space while maximizing storage areas.

I got the idea to build this model from my Dad who used to make these really cool paper models of houses he was building. Once he built a cardboard house for this Wile E. Coyote figure I had which I thought was totally awesome. That inspired me to make many cardboard spaceships as I was growing up. Some of them got pretty elaborate, with lasers made from battery powered light bulbs, missile tubes that shot small card-stock paper airplanes using elastic bands, computers with paper slides to change the display, and other more-or-less functional parts.

I was hoping this might inspire more creativity in Donnie, but it also gave me the opportunity to show him some math, including the Pythagorean Theorem, squares and roots, and working with scales (the model was scaled to match his Nick Bluetooth figure).