Ideas for Principle #35

💡 Raspberry juice - you freeze it in a mold to turn it into a frozen, hard popsicle.

Playdough - you warm it up and knead it in your hands so it turns from hard to soft and nice to play with.

Water - you can turn it into hard ice by freezing it, or into steam that evaporates when cooking - same material, a completely different feature.

Something too hard or too soft for what you want to do with it?!
Sometimes the existing features just don't suit the task in front of us.

The way to think about it: which feature (heat, cold, hardness, flexibility) can we change so the material suits the job better?

Sometimes you don't need to change the material itself - it's enough to change one of its features to get exactly what you need.

Ready for a challenge? We've prepared some extra challenges for you to try

Now it's your turn to invent. Pick one object and design a new feature it can change - hardness, color, or temperature.

Easy
1. Find one more material in the house together that changes one feature when heated or cooled.
2. Ask your child which one feature of their day they would change, if they could.

A bit of a stretch
3. Choose one fixed expense together and try changing only one parameter in it - amount or frequency.
4. Check together what happens to playdough when you warm it in your hand, compared to when it's cold.

Challenge for champions
5. Ask your child to design a new object that can change one of its features as needed - hardness or color.
6. Try together to think of a problem you got stuck on, and ask which one small feature, if it changed, would solve it.