Worldwide Day of Play is an event first started by Nickelodeon in 2005, encouraging kids and parents to turn off their screens and go play. This year’s Day of Play is this Saturday, September 29th, but was also preceded by a number of local Day of Play events across the U.S..
For our local event in Oakland, CA, we worked with After School All Stars – a local non-profit dedicated making afterschool programs more widely available to all – to create something fun (and uniquely Tinkercad) for kids to play with. Our resident maker megastar Mike Warren (a.k.a. Mikeasaurus on Instructables) created a pair of toy car race ramps with some special features.
Using a lever on the side of the ramp, kids could load up and release a pair of cars to drop down the ramp simultaneously. A spring-loaded finish line at the bottom indicated the winner of the race, while a repurposed broom head acted as a cushion and prevented the cars from falling to pieces.
Kids were encouraged to customize their race cars with 3D printed attachments including jets, engine blocks, and headlights. These swappable bits were all designed in Tinkercad, of course. You can find the designs in the Tinkercad Gallery here and use them as a basis for your own add-ons.
The kids had a blast. So did the Tinkercad team. It was a great way to share how much fun you can have designing your own custom toys and using your imagination to explore and experiment. We hope you’ll take some inspiration from this, design some hands-on design play of your own, and share it with us on Twitter or Instagram.
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