Core Skills Analysis
Science and Engineering
Grace completed a range of KiwiCo STEM projects over the year, including making a lantern, a music box and a pinball machine. Through these builds, Grace explored how designed objects could produce light, sound or movement, connecting scientific ideas to practical outcomes. Following project steps and assembling working models also helped Grace practise engineering habits such as constructing, testing and understanding how parts contributed to a whole. The different projects encouraged curiosity and hands-on problem-solving across more than one area of STEM.
Design and Technology
Grace made several designed products, including a lantern, music box and pinball machine, and gained experience turning project instructions and materials into completed objects. Each project offered a different design challenge: creating an object that illuminated, produced music or supported a game. By working through these builds, Grace developed practical making skills and a sense of how design choices and components shaped what an object could do. Completing projects across the year also gave Grace opportunities to engage with design as an iterative, hands-on process.
Mathematics
Grace’s project building provided practical contexts for mathematical thinking, such as noticing how parts fit together, comparing sizes and considering positions and movement in a pinball machine. The lantern and music box also offered opportunities to think about arrangement, shape and the relationships between components. These experiences connected mathematical ideas to tangible objects and showed how spatial reasoning could support construction. The activity therefore helped Grace use visual and practical thinking while making different STEM projects.
Tips
Tips Extend Grace’s project learning by inviting Grace to sketch a design before building, label its parts and explain what each part is intended to do. Compare the lantern, music box and pinball machine by making a simple chart of their purpose, materials and how they produce their effect. Encourage Grace to choose one completed project and redesign a feature, then describe what changed and why. To connect building with communication, Grace could create a short illustrated guide or demonstration explaining how the project works.
Book Recommendations
- The Way Things Work Now by David Macaulay: An illustrated guide to machines and mechanisms that can help Grace connect project builds with the everyday devices and principles behind them.
- Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty: A lively story about inventing, persistence and learning through making—an encouraging companion to Grace’s hands-on projects.
Learning Standards
- Science — AC9S8I01: Grace’s varied STEM builds provided contexts for asking investigable questions about how designed objects produce light, sound or movement.
- Science — AC9S8I02: Constructing project models connected with planning and carrying out practical investigations and exploring models.
- Science — AC9S8I08: Explaining a project’s parts and function in a guide or demonstration would practise communicating ideas with suitable language and text features.
- Mathematics — ACMMG200: Spatial reasoning about the arrangement and fit of components connects broadly with thinking about shapes and their positions; this is an extension rather than a specific achievement confirmed by the activity description.
- HASS — WAHASS22: Presenting an illustrated guide or demonstration about a project would align with communicating findings or explanations in different forms.
Try This Next
- Project-design worksheet: draw one KiwiCo build and label its parts and purpose.
- Compare-and-contrast chart: explain how the lantern, music box and pinball machine each produce their effect.
- Build a tabletop pinball-style game from reusable materials, then sketch and describe its design.
- Writing prompt: “Which project taught me the most about how things work, and why?”