The Global Children’s Designathon is a design thinking process especially developed for children to work on global and sustainability issues. Developed by Designathon Works from Amsterdam, children develop their own ideas and build prototypes using new technologies to solve real-world problems affecting the environment and society.
This year, The Tinkering Studio had the honour to host the Global Children’s Designathon in Singapore. On 11th November 2017 morning, eager-eyed young future-changers embarked on a design-thinking journey to solve this year’s problem theme: Water.
Steps 1 & 2: Inspire and Research
“What do we use water for? What are the type of problems we (as earthlings) face with water?”
These are the types of questions addressed, along with real-life creative solutions to inspire the inventors.
Step 3: Ideate
Working in groups of three, the inventors cracked their collective brains to figure out what problems they would like to solve. From a complexly ambiguous problem, our young inventors narrowed down their problem to come up with a tangible solution.
Step 4: Sketch
To prevent the fleeting ideas of solutions to be forgotten, inventors sketched out their prototypes. You don’t need to be in art school to be able sketch! 
Step 5: Make
And the fun part starts! Drills, hot glue guns and coding of micro:bit.
The studio was buzzing with splendid ideas and contagious creativity! As time whizzed by, those visualisation transformed into prototypes.
Step 6: Show
Before we know it, it’s time for the inventors to present their solutions to our panel of esteemed judges and their parents. Filled with confidence and a strong sense of fulfilment, our young inventors WOW-ed the audience with ingenious solutions to water issues like an automated rubbish collector to modified Roman aqueducts.
We also did a sharing session with young inventors from India. Due to our time difference, India was still on their prototyping stage.
Yay to Singapore’s participation in Global Children’s Designathon 2017!
We hope to see another batch of young inventors next year!
The Tinkering Studio Singapore 