This made me actually laugh out loud, it feels like some of the things I came up with as a teenager wanting to do robotics and automation but having no money or way to purchase things online, water bottles were actually a good way of powering things like opening curtains by dropping them on a string.

Also I like that even after you came up with "knock something off the table" you felt you needed a seesaw catapult thing and didn't just knock something off that could make the actual sound like a cake tin or bell or something.