Cardboard Inventions

When I was a child I used to love to play with old cardboard boxes. I guess I was just like a kitten who liked to use the cardboard box as a toy. Whenever someone in the neighborhood would get a new refrigerator or washing machine, the big box was given to the neighborhood children. I remember one year when we took all the boxes and put them together in a yard and made little cities out of the boxes. We decorated the boxes as individual houses and apartment buildings. We even cut doors into them and would go in and out of the different buildings. Then eventually we would make up stories of the residents of each building. This kept us busy and entertained for weeks or until it rained and all the boxes got wet and soggy. Then we would wait impatiently for someone to get another new appliance so we could begin a new adventure.

Recently I learned about this Instructables site that has a Cardboard Speed Challenge. So far there are only 13 entries and the challenge ends in 7 days but it was fun to look at the individual entries. There are some projects that I would never have thought about doing.

I believe this would be a fantastic challenge for the classroom. Let students use their imagination and discover what they could come up with. The main material would be cardboard which should be easy to get. Anything else the students would have to supply such as glue paper clips or any other material they might need for attaching things. I would give them a deadline on when their projects would have to be done and then have them present their project to the class. You could even have judges come and judge the best project with the winner getting a prize.

Or you could have students chose one of the projects already entered and have them try to make one of them. Students would follow the directions given and see if their project turns out like the original one. This is a great exercise for reading and following directions.

What would you make with cardboard? Please share.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash