Workshop [9] + [10]

Through my exploration of Tinkercad, I found that it is very tightly aligned with 21st century skills and competencies, such as creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, computational thinking. More specifically, "learning by doing" is a core concept supported by Tinkercad's tools, since students engage in projects that call for them to design digital artifacts either with shapes or with coding and then possibly test them out to see how they work! 

There is a lot of free space to get creative while using the tool, experimenting with your own designs from scratch, participating in challenges that urge you to think out of the box, getting creative ideas from tutorials on how to modify designs and possibly express yourself artistically as well. 

Collaboration is supported through the teachers' ability to handle classrooms in Tinkercad and assign designs to students, with the combination of sharing links that can be used for the students to co-edit a design. 

I would connect critical thinking directly with the SimLab environment where students can actually see their designs in motion and practice their trial and error skills. This means that they would have to pre-calculate the motion of their design, make predictions, afterwards try it and make adjustments, which is a process that I think really supports their critical thinking skills.

In the Codeblocks environment, students directly develop their computational thinking skills by figuring out how repeatable patterns can be created using algorithms,and attempting to build those step-by-step solutions to gradually go from simple to complex patterns.

By going through Tinkercad's supporting materials in the "Resources" page, I found multiple relevant materials that validate the tool's connection to 21st century skills.

• In the "Tinkercad Blog" section, there is a special section for Teachers and parents that includes many events, suggestions, tips that address 21st century skills. Specifically, some examples that I found were "Codeblocks Resources for Hour of Code™ 2024" that refers to how teachers can support the Hour of Code. This is directly linked to the development of computational thinking skills. Another one was "Traces and Graphs boost physics experimentation in Tinkercad Sim Lab" which explicitly mentions the benefits  of graphing for teachers and students, which relate to data literacy, STEAM approach and cross-disciplinary learning.

• The structure of the Learning Center which has interactive step-by-step videos and tutorials addresses self-paced learning and helps students build on their problem-solving and creativity skills.