The Junior Tinkering Programme is part of the school’s Applied Learning Programme, which aims to nurture joyful learners who are critical and inventive thinkers. Through varying types of play, students are given the platform to develop their 21^st century competencies in Critical and Inventive Thinking, Communication, Collaboration and Information skills. Our lower primary students pick up life skills such as tying their shoelaces and making breakfast, and learn essential 21st Century skills such as programming and coding with Ozobot and Scratch, as well as build and create with Lego and Strawbees.

Every Friday morning is “Tinker Time” for our lower primary students as they embark on their maker-centred challenges. They begin by tinkering with basic items and gradually move on to dominoes, Lego sets and even coding using Ozobots. Students are given the freedom to tinker and think of various ways to work on their projects in collaboration with their group members. These activities not only help our students to develop their critical and inventive thinking skills, but also polish their communication and collaboration skills by learning how to be effective team players.

Designed to give the Primary 1 and 2 students a head-start in acquiring these competencies and laying the foundation for them to navigate the changing nature and demands of work, students participate in 4 different modules during the course of each year.

Highlights of the Junior Tinkering Programme for Primary 1
Term 1: Tinkering Challenge Our Primary 1 students are given a variety of commonly used items to tinker with as they work on their mini projects. Every week, each group is given a challenge and students put on their thinking caps and creative juices flow as they discuss and decide how best to work on their projects.

We are building the tallest ice cream castle!	Look! My red octopus can stand!

Presenting our final product!	Time for action!
Term 2: Dance Mat Typing Typing remains a fundamental skill, and and learning to type accurately and eventually with speed is essential as students learn digitally. Our Primary 1 students practise their typing skills and type a self-introduction note at the end of the module.

Placing my fingers on the home row keys.		Let’s see who can type the fastest!
Term 3: Tinkering with Lego Primary 1 students are game designers as they create games for one another using Lego bricks. Rise to the challenge and complete the game in the shortest time ever in a game of Lego Maze, Twist, Ring Toss and Lego board games designed by our Primary 1 students.

Accept the challenge and try our Lego maze.			How long will you take to complete our maze?

Let’s play Twist, Ring, Toss!			Come and try our maze!
Term 4: Coding through Ozobot Ozobot is a little toy robot that blends the physical and digital worlds and our Primary 1 students use it to learn basic coding. Through the use of lines and different colour sequences, these robots will follow the patterns on the surfaces that they roll over. Students can draw lines for the robot to follow or even create race tracks for multiple Ozobots to roll over!

Look! My Ozobot is rolling on the track!	Let’s have an Ozobot challenge!

Let’s write the code for our Ozobot.	Having our discussion for our Ozbot.

Highlights of the Junior Tinkering Programme for Primary 2
Term 1: Coding through ScratchJr Using ScratchJr, Primary 2 students code their own interactive stories and games. In the process, they develop design and problem-solving skills as well as express themselves creatively on the computer. Students snap together graphical blocks to make characters move, dance and sing using the application. They can modify the characters in the paint editor, add their own voices and sounds and use the coding blocks to bring their characters to life.

Our little coders paying close attention in class.	Wow, your fiery red dragon looks menacing!

Our 2020 Primary 2 coders.	Hmm, let’s code using these graphical blocks.
Term 2: Tinkering with Strawbees Strawbees is a light-weight, construction system that allows students to connect straws to each other and build mechanical objects of different sizes. Students are encouraged to be innovative and problem solve by making, playing, testing and retrying as they build an assortment of 3D structures.

Look at our 2D shapes.	We built a strong and stable Truss Bridge.

This is my award winning fashion hat!	Let your imagination take flight and design your very own fashion hat.
Term 3: Toy Making with Electro Dough Primary 2 students design and mold conductive dough into creations that move, flash and make sounds. These toys light up as students plug an LED into a block of conductive dough. Through this activity, they are introduced to the concept of electrical circuits.

The animals are lighted up!	This is my robot friend.
Term 4: Lego WeDo Coding Primary 2 students learn how to build models and code them using LEGO WeDo which is a robotics hardware and software platform. They follow the build process step-by-step as they work collaboratively in their groups. Learning is enhanced when the coding of the models is introduced. Students use the simple click-and-drag icons to activate a motor and/or sensor, in a logical and sequential manner.

Exploring the use of the sensor and motor for our 3D model.		Let’s put these pieces of Lego together.

Hmm, let’s see how this works.		Hooray, we have built our model!

Junior Tinkering Programme