We present a low-cost, making-based, educational design probe that aims to encourage students to confidently explore and make their own choices towards tinkering. We ask; how can we encourage novice makers to explicitly focus on the materials in their making process and consciously learn from them? We chose to explore this question by applying it to a specific application area, generating electricity using found objects. We designed a guidebook that prompted novice makers to reflect and document their thoughts related to the materials they would need to generate electricity (e.g., wind, water, sunlight, and vegetables), its properties (e.g the voltage across and current through the load), and their use in an application to generate electricity and contemplate its strengths and limitations in the context of the activity. We conducted a study using our guidebook, in which twelve high-school students explored a variety of materials to build simple applications that generate electricity. Our results show that students 1) were creatively resourceful, 2) showcased abductive reasoning with found materials, 3) demonstrated curiosity towards the role materials play in the experimentation structure, and 4) were resilient when faced with failure.