19/12/03  WR

Wooden Truck

An introduction to many of the basic principles associated with the structure of wood, wooden toys and the basic needs of a customer wanting to buy a simple,

What different classes of wood are there ?  Where do these different types grow and why does climate change the characteristics of the material ?  What sort of wood is often used for making children's toys and what characteristic does this have that makes it so suitable ?  How many of these questions can you answer before starting the task of making a child's toy ?

Who will want to use the toy ?        Who will buy the toy ?        Who will make the toy ?
     

• We should check-out existing toys and analyse what makes them good or bad.
  
• We should ask the people who might buy the toy exactly what they want.
  
• We could look at cars or trucks to get ideas of shapes that might be easy to make.
  
• We should check-out suitable materials and tools that we could use.  We should also think about how a toy-maker would design the toy so that a large number of them could be made easily.
  
• We will need to understand why wood is usually 'finished' with a coating.
  
• We should know how to communicate our ideas so that someone else could build the toy for us if we needed that to happen.
  
• We could examine how toys are packaged when they are sold in toy stores.
  
• We should know how to test the final toy to make sure it is suitable for young children to play with.
  
• We could go on redesigning and improving our toy once it had been completed to make it even better….