How to Make the Easiest Upcycled Cardboard Building Set

 

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

This upcycled cardboard building set is a terrific open-ended toy that won’t cost you a cent!

If you’ve ever seen a kid with a handful of LEGOs, you know how wonderful open-ended building toys are. They let kids exercise their creativity, build their problem-solving skills, strengthen math and physics concepts–and keep themselves entertained for ages, too! Open-ended toys have a lot more extended play-value than toys that have a single purpose (and a lot LOT more play-value than noisy, light-up toys!).

This particular upcycled cardboard building set is as open-ended as they come. You can create the pieces in any shape you can imagine, connect them in a myriad of ways, and even paint or decorate them however you’d like. And the best part is that as long as you have a piece of corrugated cardboard in your recycling bin, you can expand on your building set forever.! Tbh, creating the set is as fun as building with it!

Here’s how to make the quickest, easiest, and SUPER fun upcycled cardboard building set:

To make this building set: you will need:

• corrugated cardboard. Thin cardboard won’t work for this project, but pretty much any corrugated cardboard will. If you’re short on corrugated cardboard, check your local recycling center or ask around your friend group for shipping boxes.
• scissors. Cutting corrugated cardboard does take hand muscles, but larger scissors make it easier. If you’re making this project with younger kids, let them draw the pieces they want onto the cardboard, and then you can do the tough job of cutting them out. If kids are a little older, though, give them a go at cutting the cardboard themselves–it’s tough, sure, but it builds the hand muscles they need for writing by hand and other fine motor activities.
• tools for embellishment (optional). I really like the look of these plain, but with paint, markers, or stickers, you can add variety and creative inspiration. Googly eyes are always fun, as are pieces painted in a rainbow of colors. Use your imagination to make the cardboard building set of your dreams!

Step 1: Draw templates (optional), and cut the cardboard into shapes.

I’m a little obsessed with geometric shapes, but you can cut your corrugated cardboard pieces however you like. If you’re making a basic set for a kid, a variety of geometric shapes, along with some free-formed, more abstract pieces, will give them a good starting place.

If you’re making a set WITH a kid, however, my favorite technique is to encourage the kid to draw or cut any fun shape their heart desires, modeling a few ideas for them, perhaps, to give them the idea. While they’re being creative, I’ll cut out those same boring geometric shapes (I’m obsessed!) so that they’ve got some basic pieces to work with, as well.

Step 2: Cut notches in the cardboard pieces.

Cut a thin notches in the cardboard pieces wherever you’d like them to connect. Longer notches will hold the connections more firmly, but you don’t need the notches to go more than 1/4 or 1/3 of the way through the piece.

Cutting notches is a little easier than cutting out the pieces, so if you’ve got a kid who’s on the cusp of being able to cut the corrugated cardboard, this is a doable activity to help build their hand strength.

This is also a great place to add to the interest of the set. Finding unusual places to cut notches encourages kids to make more creative connections.

To play with this toy, simply connect the notches and start building!

I think kids have the best time when they can follow their own interests and imaginations, but you can sneak in some STEM problem-solving by offering up challenges. What is the tallest tower you can build? What is the longest bridge you can build between two chair backs? Can you build a square shape using only circle pieces? Try building a cat!

Cheap, accessible toys like these are especially important to have out in the world, because they build equity. The local underfunded childcare center probably doesn’t have fancy Magna-Tiles, and heck, even Duplos are ridiculously expensive these days, but anyone can make and donate a huge set of the most beautiful cardboard building toys with some time and patience.

And homemade toys like that are important for every kid to have, even if their parents can afford the bougie stuff. Maybe it’s the pre-Christmas anti-consumerist crankiness starting in me already, but I think it’s crucial for every kid to learn that some of the best toys are both handmade and free. I mean, I love all those fancy, expensive natural wood toys as much as the next crunchy mom (ask me about my Waldorf toy obsession anytime!), but you know what’s nearly as natural, and even more free, than that?

CARDBOARD, that’s what!

Every Council's Own Girl Scout Fun Patch Program That Your Girl Scouts Can Earn from Anywhere: Technology, Engineering, and Math

Welcome back to my series in which I am listing, week by week, topic by topic, every single Council's Own Girl Scout fun patch program that your Girl Scouts can earn from everywhere!

My Girl Scout troop enjoys earning Council's Own fun patches, as well as official badges and retired badges. I usually look for a fun patch that they can earn in addition to a badge whenever we're planning a big project or a trip, etc. This list is essentially just my own research written down for easy reference.

This week's category: Technology, Engineering, and Math! Y'all, Girl Scouts apparently LOVE their STEM fun patches! I separated the science into its own category and this list is still super long. My favorite fun patches here are the couple of math ones, as even with the current STEM craze math still has a bad reputation, and math is still a subject not overtly reflected in Girl Scout badges or most of the other fun patch programs. I think that when people are tasked with creating a STEM fun patch, they often go to the easy, accessible topics and stay there--you'll see below numerous fun patch programs with a similar content area. But it's certainly possible to have a topic that so easily accessible that it will eventually be overused, and it'll then get boring for kids. I cannot even tell you, for instance, how many times my kids have separated out the DNA from a banana (always into a tiny potion bottle with a cord so they can wear it around their necks), catalyzed hydrogen peroxide and called it "elephant's toothpaste," or ran a Beebot through a maze. 

ANYWAY, you don't have to confine yourself to just the easy, most accessible STEM topics. Find a fun patch program that speaks to your kids from this list, and use to to stretch their skills and their imaginations... and do some math!

For this list, I only included fun patch programs that fit the following criteria:

1. Girl Scouts can earn this fun patch wherever they are. I did not include any fun patch programs that have site-specific criteria, unless I felt that those criteria would be easy to substitute and still maintain the point of the fun patch program. I also didn't include fun patch programs that require time-specific criteria that have already passed, such as patches programs designed for the 2020 COVID lockdowns. I noted in the description of each patch when substitutions would be required.
2. Girl Scouts can obtain the council's requirements to earn this fun patch. I found several instances in which the council still sells a specific fun patch, but has deleted all the requirements from its website. If I couldn't find an easy link to those requirements from another site, I did not include the patch.
3. Girl Scouts can obtain the physical fun patch. There were also several instances in which councils still host the requirements for a fun patch program, but no longer sell the patch (or, as in the case of a few GSAK patches, they have fewer than ten remaining). If it is unlikely for a Girl Scout to be able to obtain the fun patch, I did not include it. The link to purchase each fun patch is in the caption for its graphic.

TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND MATH

Backyard STEM and Beyond

Backyard STEM and Beyond, GSAK. Complete these simple outdoor STEM activities to earn this fun patch. This is a good fun patch program to encourage a troop to have outdoor experiences during their regular meetings.

Brighter Together GSAK

Brighter Together, Girl Scouts of Alaska. Use STEM activities to build and grow social-emotional connections. 

Building Possibilities GSGWM

Building Possibilities, Girl Scouts of the Green and White Mountains. Explore engineering through hands-on activities.

Engineering GSNETX

Engineering, Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas. Try engineering activities and learn about careers in engineering.

Explore STEM GSCCC

Explore STEM, Girl Scout Council of the Colonial Coast. Try fun activities in the four STEM fields. 

Girls Code GSAK

Girls Code, Girl Scouts of Alaska. Complete a variety of programming activities to earn this fun patch. This fun patch program pairs well with the Think Like a Programmer Journeys. It would be a good option for a Girl Scout who completes some of the Journey activities but does not do a TAP.

Math GSNETX

Math, Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas. Try math activities and learn about careers in mathematics.

Math Mania GSAK

Math Mania, Girl Scouts of Alaska. Try out games and activities that let you have fun using math. 

Mining in Today's World GSSN

Mining in Today's World, Girl Scouts of the Sierra Nevada. Learn about the mining industry. 

STEM GSEWNI

STEM, Girl Scouts of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho. Complete simple activities in different STEM fields. 

STEM and Coding GSAK

STEM and Coding, Girl Scouts of Alaska. Try a variety of STEM activities to earn this fun patch. This fun patch program pairs well with any of the STEM badges. It's a good one for a younger Girl Scout troop to earn while planning for or earning their first STEM badge.

STEM Connections GSAK

STEM Connections, Girl Scouts of Alaska. Complete a variety of activities that demonstrate how the fields of STEM connect to other areas of life. This fun patch program pairs well with any of the STEM badges and Journeys.

STEAM Dreamers GSBDC

STEAM Dreamers, Girl Scouts of Black Diamond Council. Have one meeting a year completely taken care of by earning this monthly STEAM fun patch! Older Girl Scouts will likely want to modify or substitute some of the activities to add rigor. Request the patch program materials here.

STEM Explorer, GSC

STEM Explorer, Girl Scouts of Citrus. Complete activities from a checklist to try out different STEM skills. This is a great fun patch program for Girl Scouts to complete independently.

STEMing Daisies GSSS

STEMing Daisies, Girl Scouts of Silver Sage. Daisies earn this fun patch by trying out simple and fun STEM activities. This fun patch program pairs well with any of the Daisy STEM badges. It's a good patch program for Daisies to try to help them decide when STEM badge they want to earn first.

STEMtastic GSSS

STEMtastic, Girl Scouts of Silver Sage. Try out a variety of different activities while learning about some of the fields of STEM. This fun patch program pairs well with any of the STEM badges. It's a good fun patch program to earn to help a troop decide what STEM badge they'd like to pursue.

Here's a look at my complete fun patch series:

• Arts and Crafts
• Culture, Diversity, and Equity
• Games and Sports
• Geography/History
• Outdoors
• Practical Life Skills
• Reading and Writing
• Science
• Service Learning
• Social-Emotional Skills
• Technology, Engineering, and Math

Follow my Craft Knife Facebook page for more Girl Scout resources as I exhaustively compile them!

Homeschool Chemistry of Cooking: Gelation and Spherification

 

Gelling and spherification are good hands-on activities when you're studying proteins, as it's the unfolding of proteins that allows the hydrophobic amino acids to cross-link and form a gel.

You can even look up the exact amino acids that make up the gelatin (probably glycine), and you can model those amino acids. You can also chemically test foods for proteins, if you want to make your study as hands-on and context-building as possible.

Syd and I have been working through this Harvard EdX class, Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science, and that's where we learned how spherification works. When cooking, you gotta love your polymers!  

Although the process that Syd and I used does result in spherified liquids, this isn't exactly the type of spherification that occurs in fancy molecular gastronomy restaurants. There, they use alginate and calcium to build that gel layer only around the outside of what they want spherified, leaving the inside as liquid.

These gel spheres are a solution of liquid and gelatin, and we used physical processes to shape them. 

Syd and I found a really easy-to-follow recipe for making edible spheres in The Complete Cookbook for Young Scientists, written by America's Test Kitchen, but they've actually also put the complete recipe here. It involves lots of fun stuff, like nuking pomegranate juice and unflavored gelatin--

--whisking it (tiny whisk optional but encouraged!)--

--prepping some VERY cold vegetable oil--

--and using a squeeze bottle to drop the solution into the cold oil:

Rinse the oil off, and you've got tiny, edible spheres of pomegranate gelatin!

The process IS very interesting, but alas, Syd and I both thought that the edible spheres were super gross. We never did get every minute speck of oil rinsed away, so they definitely felt oily, and they'd lost a lot of sweetness, as well. 

If you ever could get all the oil rinsed off, I think that these edible spheres would be fun as ice cream toppers, or even as a boba substitute in tea. For us, though, we marveled at our cross-linked polymer chains enabled by the heat-activated unfolding of proteins to reveal the hydrophobic amino acid components...

... and then we fed them to the chickens.

Things I Bought for My Teenagers and They Liked: Shashibo

When I buy gifts for the kids Christmas stockings, I still like to include a sensory/open-ended fidget-type toy. Both of my kids are sensory seekers, and one, in particular, is also a fidgeter. They both like patterns and love logic games, although the logic games that they each prefer are very different.

These Shashibo, thanks to being embarrassingly spendy, were a bit of a gamble. The kids haven't aged out of a lot of sensory toys as much as they've aged out of the packaging and marketing for those toys, so I was having a hard time coming up with something that filled a sensorial need but would appeal to a couple of jaded teenagers. The Shashibo looked sophisticated--with a price point to match!--and when I researched I did note a lot of older kids and adults playing with them.

So I bought a set of four. And my teenagers like them!

Here's what we like about them:

They're fiddly.

You can make specific shapes and patterns, but you can also literally just fiddle with the Shashibo, and beautiful shapes and patterns just appear. The flipping and folding feel nice, as does the little tug to separate the magnets.

The patterns are appealing.

The way the color schemes work, there's always an interesting visual pattern to look at as you fiddle with the Shashibo. And when you land on a shape that you like, that's pretty, too, as is the color combo that makes up that shape. 

The Shashibo fit together to make bigger patterns.

This is personally my favorite part of the Shashibo, and the fuel of my great desire to own MORE SETS! The shape that you make with one cube will often work symmetrically with the same shape made with one or more of the other cubes, or different shapes will somehow nest interestingly inside another shape. If you're a pattern lover, it will make you very happy!

Repeating the patterns is challenging.

Syd is, like, a visual-spatial genius, so she usually helps me mimic a particular shape when I get stuck, since my own method for mimicking a shape is just to fiddle with it like I fiddled with the previous cube to get the previous shape.

Since we've got four cubes, whenever one of us lands on an interesting shape by fiddling with a single cube, there's always the question of how can we make that shape with the other cubes, too? But because whoever made the cool shape was usually just doing it through mindless fiddling, it's quite a lot of mental work, sometimes, to figure out how to purposefully mimic it with another cube.

Here's what I don't like about them:

They're EXPENSIVE!

OMG I'm literally embarrassed at how much I paid for these, and I will forever scour garage sales and thrift stores to add to my collection rather than buy anymore new, because I need that money for college tuition now.

They might not be super durable?

This isn't a complaint that I have about them, but a complaint that I've seen in some reviews. Some people say the stickers peeled off of theirs after a while, making the cubes unusable since the stickers are what make the folding possible. I dunno, though--we handle ours quite a bit, but we are always super careful with them, and we've made it to May with them looking brand-new still.

What I really need is for Shashibo to get into the educational supply game, like some of my other fun building toys have. I'd probably manage to justify a large set that was discounted for use in my homeschool, especially if it came with lesson plans and extension activities, something like what Zometools has. I have a BIG set of Zometools AND a bunch of their lesson plans and books of extension activities, and I didn't feel guilty at all about blowing my homeschool budget on them because (turn on the homeschool parent voice) they're EdUcAtIoNaL!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

DIY Robotic Arms for the Girl Scout Senior and Ambassador Programming Robots Badges

 

Step 2 of the Girl Scout Senior Programming Robots badge asks the kid to build a robot arm. Step 2 of the Ambassador Programming Robots badge asks the kid to build a motorized robot.

Let's streamline the process of mentoring a Girl Scout Senior and Girl Scout Ambassador through earning this badge together by asking them each to build a motorized robotic arm!

Each kid built her own OWI Robotic Arm Edge kit, obtained via a grant from the Civil Air Patrol.

You guys, these kits were TOUGH!!! I would consider both my kids adept at reading and following step-by-step directions, possibly even a little more adept than your average teenagers, just because we do a lot of step-by-step tutorials and crafts and hands-on activities in our homeschool.  But they both struggled quite a bit with these robotic arm kits, and each made several mistakes that they had to go back and troubleshoot. 

The older kid wasn't quite as careful as her sister, and she even managed to break a couple of pieces--she stripped a screw that she really needed to be able to unscrew to get back into the plastic casing to see what she'd done wrong (she'd put a piece of the motor on backwards), and she accidentally pulled a wire off of its connection. That one, at least, was an excellent learning opportunity, as it then became the first time she ever stripped wires and soldered them to their connection:

It was VERY satisfying when the motor then worked perfectly!

Other than the couple of times they got stuck (and thank goodness their grandfather happened to be visiting, because he had the patience both to compare every step of the instructions to their work to find the mistakes, and to sometimes disassemble the robotic arm back to that step so they could try it again), they mostly worked peacefully while we listened to podcasts together. We got through the entire 36 Questions podcast while DIYing robotic arms!

Finally, all you have to do is assemble the battery case and add SO MANY BATTERIES--

--and then you've got a fully functional robotic arm all of your very own!

You can see in this photo how a little hot glue was also required. The older kid was so rough on her poor robotic arm!

These robotic arms have already come in handy for more than just earning Step 2 of the Programming Robots badge. The older kid is at work on the Ambassador Designing Robots badge, and used her robotic arm, along with some of the hydraulics that were last used building a cardboard robotic arm the last time the kids earned the Programming Robots badge at the Cadette and Senior levels to make a working model of a robot that could dispense a drink into a cup. 

The kids will soon have yet another use for their robotic arms, as well, as for Step 5 of this badge, they'll each be using the USB Interface Kit to write a program for their robotic arm. So it's a good thing that they got their robotic arms working... even if it did require a bit more hot glue and duct tape than I'd been expecting!

P.S. Want to know more about all the weird math I have my kids do, as well as our other wanderings and wonderings? Check out my Facebook page!