What can you create with a stack of cardboard, dozens of hot glue sticks, scissors, several rolls of duct tape, cardboard cores, paper cups, plastic caps and a little imagination?
How about a room full of arcade-style games for you and your friends?
That’s what students in the cardboard class at Lawton Public Schools’ Makerspace Camp are discovering. Students start the week off with something fairly simple — making their own Plinko game out of a piece of cardboard and several cardboard cores. By the end of the week, the classroom resembles a small arcade with all sorts of games whose main building materials are cardboard and duct tape.
Lots of cardboard and lots of duct tape. And lots and lots of hot glue.
The games are the students’ own creations. They are given a few suggestions as to what types of games they might design, but how they accomplish that is up to them. So is problem-solving, which the students often do in impromptu groups.
Natalie Galaise, 10, decided to build her own version of whack-a-mole. She named hers whack-a-cat, but not because she dislikes cats. “I love cats, but I don’t know how to make a mole. I thought it would be something different,” she said.
She cut four holes in a cardboard box, made a back for it that was supported by a “beam” of cardboard cores and created a cat puppet, cherry bomb puppet and a hammer. She had to reach her hands into the back of the box to make the puppets pop out of the holes.
“The biggest challenge is actually to go into the box to place the mole. Other than that, everything is good,” she said as she worked on her game.
What had she learned from this exercise?
“That cardboard is a little stubborn,” she said as she tried to figure out how to make the back of the game stand up.
Teacher Charlene Rogers suggested taping several cardboard cores together and taping those to the back to make it sturdy enough to stay upright. Galaise went to work on her suggestion.
“It doesn’t matter how much tape I use,” she said, because she was going to paint over it.
When she was finished with her design, she and another student conducted a test run.
“The test run went pretty smoothly. I made a hanger for the hammer,” she said.
In another part of the room, Mariah Biggins, 11, was working on her claw machine.
Why a claw machine?
“Because if I made a claw machine, I want all little kids to have fun and get stuff,” she said. To ensure that players got “stuff”, Biggins purchased toys as prizes.
Biggins explained how she came up with the game.
“I thought to myself, it has a claw, it has a mirror, it has a button,” she said. “I thought to myself about all the stuff it has. Nothing was hard about it except adding plastic wrap on it.”
Rogers said Biggins did all of the work on the machine herself.
“The only thing I helped her with was the plastic wrap,” Rogers said. “I told her I didn’t know what we were going to make the string out of because I didn’t have any string. She said she had it figured out. She was going to use duct tape.”
Biggins said the claw is made from folded up duct tape, a piece of cardboard and a large S hook, which grabs the toys.
Biggins, who said she likes science and having fun, said she has played claw machines before.
“Some are super hard and won’t let you get anything. Some are easy and let you get lots of things,” she said.
Rogers, who teaches a class at Makerspace Camp every year, said she came up with the idea for a cardboard session after watching Caine’s Arcade video about a boy in California who created an arcade of cardboard games in his dad’s car parts store.
“I like to have fun. I saw the video on Caine (Caine’s Arcade) and I thought, ‘That’s perfect.’ I do something different every year because I get bored,” Rogers said.
“I hope they learn how to use their imagination and problem solve and to be creative,” she said. “There is not enough creative time. These are not necessarily skills they get to use in the classroom. We need thinkers, we need innovative people.”
One of the innovative students at Makerspace Camp was Jacob Bennett, 11, who was working on a cup toss game.
“You toss the ball and it goes into the cups. You get so many points for each cup,” he explained as he labeled each cup with the appropriate number of points. He said he came up with the idea because he had seen the game before. “I played it, but I wasn’t very good at it,” he said.
He made two rows of cups so that two people could play at once.
“It was pretty easy to make,” he said. While it may have been easy to make, those who played it had a difficult time getting the balls into the cups, proving the game called for a level of expertise.
Bennett said he had enjoyed the class.
“We are able to be hands-on and make things that, I think, is very cool to do,” he said.
Another student who put his imagination and problem-solving skills to use was Peyton Ball, 11, who created a marble alley. Sam Lockhart, teacher at Pat Henry, helped Ball cut several holes in a piece of cardboard for his game. As Lockhart cut the holes, Ball explained that he was going to place paper cups in the holes so a marble could drop into each cup. Ball also discovered a potential problem — would the lip on the cups prevent the marbles from falling in?
“That’s going to be a problem,” he said. “Marbles are going to roll around the lip on the cup. I don’t know yet how to solve that problem. I thought about cutting the lip off, but that is a last resort option.”
After the holes were cut out and the paper cups inserted, it was time to try out the game. Ball discovered that he could hold the game up and tilt it to make the marble go into the cups, except that the marble kept falling off the back or the sides of the game. A classmate who was watching suggested that Ball add a back and sides to the flat piece of cardboard to keep the marble in place, which Ball eventually did.
Ball said creativity and brainstorming were his favorite parts of the cardboard class.
Other games included several variations of ring toss, tabletop hockey and a miniature golf course. After the games were created, students painted their pieces of cardboard to make them attractive.
Then, it was time to play.
The students got to try out not only their own games, but also each other’s on the last day of camp. Ball was playing the ball toss game created by Bennett.
“I like it; it is challenging,” he said. “The colors are fun. It’s kinda like basketball and I like basketball. It wasn’t easy shooting the balls into the cups. It was hard. I got four out of 12, so once every three.”
In return, Bennett tried out Ball’s marble game.
“You have to roll it around and move cardboard to get it into the cup. It’s very fun,” Bennett said. Then the two boys tried out the hockey game, where the puck was made out of two plastic bottle caps glued together.
Not only did the students try out each other’s games, some special visitors also got in on the fun. Robin Harris, principal of Makerspace Camp, and two other administrators stopped by to try out the various games.
Harris and John Robertson got into a heated game of hockey after each tried their hand at shooting hoops at the basketball game made by Jayden Gordon. Gordon made a basketball hoop out of cardboard and added a tower of cardboard cores in the back to keep it from falling over. He also added cardboard braces to keep the hoop up and created a backstop so that the ball rolled back to the players.
Robertson said he liked the claw machine (he grabbed a prize when he tried it out) and the basketball hoop, because the ball came back.
“Someone spent some time on it; it’s realistic,” he said of the basketball game.
Harris said she was glad the class was included this year.
“That was a lot of fun, very creative. They took the game and made it their own. A lot of problem-solving going on,” Harris said. “Golfing was really hard, I probably went past par,” she laughed. “The kids enjoying it is what makes me happy.”
The adults weren’t the only ones happy with the projects.
“I’m happy because they played my game,” Galaise said of her whack-a-cat game. “I worked really hard on it. I learned not everything is going to be perfect. You just do your best.”
Galaise, who will take her game home when Makerspace Camp is over at the end of June, plans to play it with her little brother.
*Makerspace Camp is provided by Lawton Public Schools in partnership with Arts for All Summer Institute.