Wednesday After School - Day 2

This week, we received the information that we had all been waiting for - this session, we'll be building a...

TRACTOR! What kind of tractor? We weren't sure yet! This is where our creative tinkering minds came in!

Here at Tinkering School, we always begin each project with a giant group design process. We have no idea where any of our projects  will go until we get the input from all of the brains in the room! We start with 10 minutes of independent ideation before sharing our brainstorming with the entire team. Each person has a chance to share at least one idea before a group design starts taking shape.

Here, you can see us getting our ideas onto paper:

And sharing our individual ideas with the group:

Check out how many ideas we developed! After sifting through our awesome brainstorm, we decided to build a tractor with two moving parts and room for two kid-sized operators! We're going to build a tractor that can pick up giant barrels in two different ways!

We spent the rest of the afternoon experimenting with how we might actually make those moving parts for our tractor. We use loose screws, bolts with washers and nuts, and a spinning skateboard wheel to model and test our ideas. Check it out: