Lexington, KY - When Bill Cloyd was 18 years old, he used old TV antenna towers to build an 80-foot-tall structure for bungee jumping. That was followed by a spinning centrifuge ride and a device to launch people through the air and into a body of water.
For Cloyd, they were more than amusing diversions - they were learning experiences. Those early projects applied the engineering concepts he was studying at the University of Kentucky and much more.
"You learn things you don't get in the classroom," he said.
That also was a big step in what would become Cloyd's passion: helping young people discover how fun, educational and rewarding it can be to conceive, design and build things.
While Cloyd went on to become a mechanical engineer and high school physics and math teacher, he now teaches those lessons through Newton's Attic, a nonprofit organization he founded 14 years ago. Newton's Attic provides summer camps, school programs and tutoring in hands-on science and engineering.
He has run the nonprofit from the rural home just outside Lexington where he grew up and built his earliest projects.
Much of his contact with students takes place in after-school programs at schools in central Kentucky and at summer camps at the University of Kentucky. Programs range from a junior apprentice program that deals mostly with building simple projects from wood, such as birdhouses, stilts and rubberband shooters, to "Mechanalia," a design, construction and strategy-oriented program where teams of students build robotic arms from a kit and compete against other teams in demonstrating their creations. Mechanalia requires students to learn skills such as welding and milling on their way to creating the finished product.
Perhaps the best known camp offering is Camp Catapult, where campers design and build a variety of projectile launchers.
An example of an after-school project currently in process is with the First Robotics Team at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School.
Students have about six weeks to build a robot capable of navigating inside a would-be basketball court for machines. The robots must also be able to launch basketballs into different goals and rebound missed shots.
Michael Halwes is a junior at Dunbar and in his third year as part of the team.
"There is quite a steep learning curve," Halwes said in explaining what needs to be done for the project. Students stay after school until 7 p.m. most days and come into the school to work on the project on Saturdays, too.
"It really takes a lot of initiative on the part of the students," he said.
But Cloyd is among those there to help guide the students.
The team will take its robot to a competition in Knoxville, Tenn., in March.
"I would rather work with kids all day long than with adults," said Cloyd, who still does some engineering consulting work, mostly in the field of accident reconstruction.
While Cloyd and his wife, Dawn, don't have children of their own, Bill Cloyd sometimes describes his job with Newton's Attic as that of a "professional grandfather" who gets to show kids how to use power tools and build things and then send them home to their parents.
"And people pay me to do it," he said.
Bill Cloyd credits Dawn (they have been married 10 years) with doing a lot of the promotional and community partnership work that has helped Newton's Attic grow from just a few summer campers in its first year to more than 140 last year.
And the nonprofit group is working on a deal that would put Newton's Attic into a 13,000-square-foot space for a machine shop, project development area and an outdoor testing and demonstration area.
Cloyd said he hopes to use the area to not only do more projects with students, but also professional development for teachers.
The facility would also become home to the summer camps, though Cloyd said he would maintain ties with the UK College of Engineering, which has hosted the camps in the past.
Last year, Newton's Attic received a large donation of used power tools (Cloyd estimated the value at $40,000) that would be put to work in the new location.
And if that new location comes to fruition, Newton's Attic will be looking to expand its team of community partners, donations of materials and volunteers.