Introduction: Colour Wheel Spinner Toy.

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Spinners are great toys, they spin at very high speeds with little effort from your hand movements.


It gets even better when we make them educationally important, yes, we can use them to teach colour mixing in a fun way.


Here we'll learn to make colour wheel spinners with items almost always already lying in a pupil's school sets.

Supplies

1) Small piece of cardboard.

2) A drawing sheet.

3) Crayons

4) A paper tape

5) A pencil

6) A ruler

7) Blade or a pair of scissors

8) A compass.

9) Super glue or gum.

10) 45cm length thick thread.

11) A flat pan or any other metallic surface

12) A source of heat. (microwave, stove etc.)

13) A small drew driver or nail.

Step 1: Cutting the Cardboard.

Take a piece of cardboard, a pencil and the paper tape. Place the paper tape on the cardboard, draw out its inner circumference on the cardboard.
Take a blade or scissors and cut out the circular cardboard.

Step 2: Cutting the Drawing Sheets.

Take a sheet of drawing paper, place the paper tape on it and trace its inner circumference on the paper and cut out the circular paper. Do this one more time to get two circular paper sheets cut out from the drawing paper.

Step 3: Drawing Colour Sections on the Two Drawing Paper.

Take one of the circular paper, fold it into two, fold it again into two, finally, fold it into two one more time, and flatten it. Unfold the paper, you would notice the creases across it dividing it into eight conical sections (sectors), use a pencil to draw lines along these creases, the point of intersection of all the creases is the circle's center.

Measure the radius of the circle, divide it into three and mark out the division along the eight radii of the circle. For mine, the radius was 3.6, so I measured 1.2 from the circumference and marked it, measured the next 1.2 (making 2.4) and mark it, measured the last 1.2 (totalling 3.6) which falls at the centre of the circle.

Use a compass to draw two circles from the two marked points on each radii, now we have three compartments in each of the eight sectors in the circular paper.

Do this for the second paper, too.

Step 4: Colouring!

Using the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow, we'll produce the three secondary colours, purple (blue+red), green(blue+yellow) and orange(red+yellow).


Take the metal pan and heat it to a temperature high enough to melt crayons on contact (you need to be careful handling it), take one of the circular papers and tape it to the pan. For each of the circle section (outer, middle and inner), colour it with crayons as shown in the picture i.e for the outer section, blue and red in alternating patterns through the eight boxes. For the middle section, blue and yellow in alternating pattern through the eight boxes. For the innermost/center circle, yellow and red in alternating pattern through the eight boxes.


Do this for the second sheet.


Note: To colour, start colouring from the centre of each box, once you place the tip of the crayon at the centre of a box on the paper, the heat from the pan will melt the crayon unto the paper and make it spread, be careful how much crayon you melt into each box so it doesn't extend into other boxes.


You may need to use the tip of a pencil to spread the melted crayon into the corners of each box.


Note: From the pictures, I initially coloured the paper ordinarily with crayon, but it was too light on the paper to work well.

Step 5: Sandwiching the Spinner.

Take the circular cardboard piece from step one rub glue/gum on both sides and gum the two circular paper sheets on both sides.

Step 6: Adding the Thread.

Take a small screw driver or nail with a pointed tip and punch two holes opposite each other at the centre of the spinner disc, apply little super glue around the punched holes to prevent further wearing. Thread in the thread through the two holes and knot it at the free ends.

Step 7: Finally!

Put your two index fingers into both ends of the thread loop, using one of your hands, manually spin the disc to make the thread tightly wound together. Now, separate your hands further apart and closer back together, continue the cycle, the spinner should be spinning at high speed and the colours visually blended to give the colour which would be obtained through colour mixing i.e outer section turns purple(red+blue) on spinning, middle section turns green(blue+yellow) and inner/center section turns orange(red+yellow).

Step 8: Conclusion.

Have fun!

Note: The first GIF (on the left) was recorded in poor lighting.