As usual, Tuka is running towards Maco’s house at high speed. She has her sights set on the distant horizon, and almost squashes a tiny, cute snail. But luckily, Tuka notices the terrified creature at the last moment and is able to stretch her foot over the snail. Tuka stops to admire the creature, which stares up at her with big eyes and blinks its long lashes. The lamplight is so dim that it’s extremely dangerous for the snail to be moving around in dusky dawn. Tuka decides to save the snail’s life and lifts the tiny, slimy creature into the palm of her hand. She carefully carries it over to the other side of the road, and places it safely on the ground next to a mailbox. And it was lucky that she did so, because just then someone comes shooting out from behind a large building on a hover board! “I don’t think a little snail knows much about pedestrian crossings and traffic signs!” This is the conclusion that Tuka reaches as she continues on her journey.
The doorbell rings. Unusually, Tuka is the last one to arrive at Maco’s house. The others are already there, sitting in a circle on the living room floor and waiting for her. Maco has been digging through his cupboards and has collected a huge amount of building materials in some large cardboard boxes. “What are we going to do with these? Where shall we start?” Waaba asks happily. Maco has an idea. His superpower always appears when there’s a need for creativity and complex thinking. Maco suggests that they should sort the materials into different stacks according to their geometric shapes. It will then be much easier to form a good picture of the different parts of the machine and start the actual construction.
Waaba is keen to collect all the round and curved shapes, and is already rolling them into a pile. Maco is more systematic, and chooses to stack all of the square shapes. He shares his knowledge by giving the others some more detailed information. His stack will only have shapes whose sides are exactly the same length and whose corners are exactly the same size. Tuka chooses rectangles, because moving them seems to require the most strength – at least, at first glance. Once again, Soca hasn’t had time to choose anything, as he hasn’t been able to get a word out of his mouth. He’s left with triangles. “I wonder if there are any triangular surfaces at all in the pile of materials?” he thinks to himself.
When all of the material in the boxes has been sorted into neat stacks, Tuka starts showing off about the height of her stack. She’s sure that she’s collected the most objects. Maco disagrees with Tuka about the number of items. Waaba suggests that, to solve the problem, everyone should count the number of items in their stack. Maco agrees, and fetches a pen and some squared paper. Everyone should colour in the same number of squares as there are objects in their stack.
To everyone’s surprise, in the middle of the calculation process Maco announces that he’s made a blunder. He has accidentally collected one of Tuka’s rectangles. (Oops! That was a mistake!) The crew spend a few moments discussing the difference between a square and a rectangle. Maco laughs and hands over the rectangle to Tuka. Tuka is even more excited, and adds another coloured square to her column.