RAY MCDONALD

                                                               Return to INVENTING THE WORKS blog 

 

This profile originally appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of The Works newsletter.

On his first visit to The Works, Ray McDonald was hardly halfway through the museum when the earthquake machine in the classroom broke.   Ray offered to take a look and wound up fixing the thing, to the delight of a roomful of kids who wanted to “shake test” the towers they were building.

That was just the beginning.  Since then, Ray has rewired, readjusted, redesigned or rebuilt many exhibits at The Works.  For instance, he created the new, vastly improved finish line on our popular Race Track exhibit, complete with optical sensors to track each start and finish, plus custom electronics to display the run time down to the millisecond.  Ray has also encouraged and inspired many kids to try Tech Take Apart and other hands-on projects at The Works.  Thank you, Ray, for keeping the exhibits going and the kids thinking.

In his own childhood, in the small town of Salix, Iowa, Ray dismantled junk his dad brought home for him – a carburetor, a windup mechanism, and (treasure of treasures) a two cylinder Maytag gasoline engine.   As a teen, he started a TV and radio repair business.  After completing a degree in Electrical Engineering at South Dakota State University, Ray ran communication networks, designed test equipment, invented patentable parts of pacemakers and implantable drug pumps, and launched a rapid prototyping business.

What’s next?   Ray says he is 89% through creating a brand new exhibit for The Works, a digital decoder lock that makes a kid-pleasing game out of binary encoding.  Also there are plans to use joy sticks to digitize the light controllers on the stage lighting exhibit.  That project is 35 % done.   He aims to complete those soon, because he and his wife Fran are looking forward to two very special events in May – the births of their first two grandchildren!  

Return to INVENTING THE WORKS blog