Play Water Pump Races

The Tulip Festival in Woodburn Oregon attracts visitors from around the region. Even on rainy and cold days you can find people there (this rainy and cold day it was me). They have some neat kids activities. One I was particularly interested in was the water pump duck races.

Kids or a helpful adult pumps the hand pumps until enough water floods their chutes to push their ducks along. I like the activity because it has a lot of variation; each pump has little differences, each chute has a different amount or size of ducks, and everyone pumps differently. 

Only the older kids understood that is was a race, but the little ones had just as much fun. I can see this providing hours of fun at a school or early childhood center too.

A few design details:
- both ends of the chutes sat over animal  troughs that held the water
- the pumps were actually pumping water from these troughs
- the chutes were made of gutter materials
- loos parts of the rubber ducks made it all worth while

This is another venture into the world of hand pumps. I liked these, for their intended purpose. It would not work in all applications, but on this drizzly spring day it was engaging, functional  and entertaining.

See my other post on hand pumps Finding the Perfect Hand Pump