At School we just used @TinkeringStudio’s Cardboard Automata project to do some ‘cardboard engineering’ I was pretty pleased with the way it came out. I was fairly prescriptive with the first mechanical parts and gave almost no advice for the creative bit.
Working with a multi-composite class made this pretty interesting. If I’d just had p6-7 I would have probably given them the instruction sheets and let them get on with it helping where needed. As it was I managed to split work into sections and gave verbal and demos for each without, I hope, frustration the older children too much.
We managed to incorporate a fair bit of maths (measure, division, shape) along with skills for work, problem solving and creativity which I think justified the time spent. I hope to try out some of the other TinkeringStudio projects.
There is a quick video of some of the finished results on the class blog.
Chris Aldrich