Meet me at the carnival

Roll up! Rollup! It's carnival time at Invention Squad. What better way to beat off the winter blues than to design a great fair game and play it with your friends? This was definitely the funnest, wackiest session yet. We challenged the kids to make a transportable/foldable set-up and to test it by playing it with their friends and parents. This is cardboard prototyping and design by play- a natural for kid experimenters.

This design had a moving element. The girls came up with a spinning ball trap, with cups attached to a central cylinder.

Testing time. This game is trickier than it looks.

This two person game is built like a tray to be carried around one person's neck. Players face one another and compete to get balls into the suspended cups.

               
  This team decided to go big and built a personal pool table. Loads of action, lots of laughs.

Junction Function

 This week's challenge: to reimagine the Bathurst/Adelaide corner. This is a busy intersection close to the Boys and Girls' Club. We asked for a streetscaping feature to animate the sidewalk for pedestrians.

This inventor constructed a  little free sidewalk library out of cardboard. These community book exchanges are popping up all over the city. The book slot is in the front and the blue roof flaps open to reveal an array of slots for storage. This library is also designed to hold small knick knacks for pedestrians to help themselves to.

This designer made a sidewalk drum kit for musically inclined passersby.

This team wanted to put a corner skate deck and parkette. Their design includes a burrowing tube with a skylit garden hub and various interconnecting bridges to skateboard over. 

In this design, there is a multilayered seat and a shelter that doubles up as a wheelchair accessible viewing platform.

 This team are missing Ontario Place, so they designed a play pool with convertible recliner chairs that can be used as mini slides (green), a life guard seat on wheels (yellow) and a dive deck (transparent) with a detachable pod slide (blue).

                    Quite a range of different ideas this week. Well done kids!