Ballista

My 9-year-old and I spent a great afternoon putting this together, and the fact that it's a working siege weapon made the engineering part way more exciting than a typical building project. The launching mechanism actually flings the foam projectile a surprising distance, which was the payoff for al

The wooden pieces fit together with a satisfying click, and my son actually understood how the tension mechanism works after we built it. Assembly took us about an hour together, and now he's been launching cotton balls across the living room all afternoon.

My kids fought over who got to launch the next projectile, and the trigger mechanism held up through dozens of shots without jamming once. The whole build took about an hour and the satisfaction of seeing it actually fire was worth every step.