Hey!

Mandie Rose has had the privilege of instructing Crankin Engines camps for over ten years all over North Carolina and Virginia. She is the owner and mechanic at MechaniChics LLC, a mobile small engine repair and service company in the Triad of NC. Along with her husband, Nick, she homeschools their five children (age 5-18) and is currently creating a curriculum for NC studies. Their goal is to travel the US teaching and learning full-time in an RV! She loves going to work every day!

How Crankin Engines camps began

© Crankin Engines is a fantastic curriculum created by homeschool dad and retired college automotive professor Rankin Barnes. When he and Mandie first met at the NC Homeschool Conference in 2014, they struck up a quick rapport, discovering that they shared many similar interest and a love for teaching.

She began teaching his curriculum in August of 2014 to a band of 20 students at her home. (That's her dad in the foreground of this photo!) Then she taught it as a semester class at local homeschool co-ops, and she later morphed the curriculum into a summer camp format.

After years of tweaking and learning from her students, she has found the current format to be the best way to help students learn the material and carry the information into life skills they can use indefinitely.

Over the last 10 years, Mandie has taught over 1,000 students how to disassemble and reassemble these engines and how to pick their nose and get away with it.

What Crankin Engines Camp is today

Staying true to the curriculum, Mandie teaches the basics of small engine rebuilding, but also throws in some tool building, hangman, chemistry of combustion, cork blasting, and more! You can see some of the snippets from camp on social media. Those links are above.

The goal for camp is to learn some basic skills that can be the foundation for other areas of a student's life. Mistakes are expected and required. Questions and critical thinking are a natural part of the discovery. And, bonus, when camp is complete, a student will have the confidence to know that they can master just about anything given the right instruction and opportunity to explore.

Did you know? Rankin wrote the requirements for the Trail Life USA small engine badge directly from the contents of this camp.

Now there's Crankin Engines 2 - a camp that uses an OHV Briggs and a plastic carburetor to advance student knowledge into current construction. It's still disassembly and assembly, but with new things to explore. It's an add-on for students who want to continue learning and convert potential into kinesthetic.