Lunch Bucket Buddies
The trades

Try all of them. Then pick.

Nobody knows what they're good at until they've done it. The kits move through a different trade each time on purpose — carpentry, then structures, then plumbing, then wiring — so a kid gets a real taste of each one before deciding anything.

Start with Kit #1What going deeper looks like

One kit, one trade

Ten trades a kid can actually try

Each kit is a small, finishable project built around the thing that trade really does. No lectures — the work carries the lesson.

Carpentry

Frame a house from laser-cut balsa. Square corners, level floors, a roof that sits right.

Structures

A working drawbridge with a counterweight — find out why bridges are shaped the way they are.

Plumbing

Real fittings at model scale. Dry-fit the run, find the leak, fix the leak.

Electrical

A low-voltage circuit with a switch that actually works, wired from a plan you read yourself.

Concrete

Mix, pour, screed. Learn what too much water does before it matters.

Landscaping

Grade a yard so the water goes where you want it. The first trade with a full track behind it.

Roofing

Overlap, slope, and why water has never once gone uphill.

Painting

Prep, edges, and a finish that doesn't run. The part everyone underestimates.

Excavating

Dig, backfill, compact. Small machines, big consequences.

Surveying

Measure, mark, and set out a build before anyone touches a tool.

The lid keeps the record

Every finished kit earns a sticker for the inside of the lid. After a year the bucket shows what a kid has actually tried — and which ones they went back to.

That's a better signal than any career quiz. "I keep choosing the building ones" is something a kid can notice about themselves, and it holds up because they earned it one project at a time.

  • Collector's
    Edition
    first 200
  • Kit 1Framing
  • Kit 2Bridge
  • Kit 3next up
  • Kit 4empty

A year in, the lid shows what they tried — and which trades they went back to.

The inside of the lid with a square for each completed kit.
When one of them sticks

Then you can go as deep as you want

Sampling is the point at the start. But when a kid keeps coming back to the same kind of work, a kit every few months stops being enough — they want the real thing.

Landscaping is the first trade with a full track written behind it: twenty modules across five levels, from "landscaping is dozens of careers" all the way to a capstone a contractor would recognise. The other trades follow the same shape as their kits come online.

See the landscaping track

What a deep track adds

  1. Lessons, not just builds

    Short hands-on sessions a parent, teacher, or camp leader can run in 25 minutes.

  2. Real sites

    The yard, the school grounds, the park. The landscape around the kid becomes the textbook.

  3. Levels that climb

    Identify it → do it → understand why → solve problems with it → be trusted with it.

  4. A way out the other side

    Enough skill and vocabulary to be useful on a crew, and a map of where the careers are.

Nine buddies, because nobody is good at everything

Amir designs, Carmen frames, Pierce plumbs, Pemba paints, Randy handles the landscape. The comic makes the same argument the kits do: find the part that fits you, and work with people who cover the rest.

Meet the crew

The character line-up: nine buddies and Mrs. Hayes, each with the tool of their trade.