Built by 150+ young designers  with over 500 pounds of industrial excess, Pinball Sandbox used creativity and collaboration to dissolve the boundaries between computational thinking and everyday material.  By using play to reimagine the pinball machine, this project created a space with multiple paths of entry for all students to learn computational thinking whether it was with pipe cleaners or Python.  Using Scratch programming language, Makes Makey’s, Sphero’s, and other tangible electronics, young designers across Los Angels built off of pinball’s simple game mechanics of targets, bumpers, and traps to invent and play test a new type of game.  


Encouraging children to use trash to make things is one of the most pressing rejoinders to an overwhelmingly wasteful period of technological planned obsolescence.  Turning trash into a materia prima, scales invention education and expands a sustainable practice of repurposing for learning.  Following one’s manual intuition, means moving past a fixation on what is being used to make to understand that computational forms can be as malleable and basic as trash or sand in a sandbox.  
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