Furniture Prototypes explores product design engineering in activities designed to support the technical skill of paper manipulation alongside the development of prototyping and critiquing skills. Pupils will learn to roll paper into strong rods during the skill builder in order to confidently and rapidly prototype during tinker time. Using a design brief, pupils will build a (model or life-sized) piece of furniture using paper rods.

Furniture Design & Prototype

Tinker time activities are child lead activities aimed to deepen thinking, skills and knowledge gained through the exploration and skill builder activities (together with existing knowledge and skills). The idea is to give children little or no instruction, but let them make their own decisions to create their own design solutions. The learning objective focuses on effectively using the iterative Maker{Cycle} process rather than on the finished product. Children should aim to create several iterations by rapid prototyping their ideas in draft form and test early on in the process. This allows lots of time to see what works and what doesn't. Children will need reminding to test their prototypes along the way.