They develop analytic and design acumen while bringing video games to life
This October, Sycamore School students embarked on projects combining creativity, design, and hands-on building to bring their own arcade games to life at the Halloween-themed Cardboard Carnival.
Molly Ripton, the school’s director of admission and development, said they have hosted the Cardboard Carnival since the school opened in 2015.
“They brainstorm, prototype, and construct games entirely from cardboard — each one Student Imagined, Student Designed, and Student Built,” Ripton explained.
Showcasing the creativity and ingenuity of the students, this year’s Carnival delighted attendees. Students approach their projects guided by the design thinking process.
“Park Hadjio-McPhee, 7, created a puzzle game and a maze,” Andrew McPhee, Park’s father, explained. “They had prizes and booby traps — you could roll the ball around the maze and you might get sprayed with water or get a cardboard piece of candy.”
Learning while having fun
“The way they teach at Sycamore uses project-based learning and the children are tasked to learn and express skills, ranging from math, communication, and physics — the Carnival is an example of that,” McPhee said. “I come from a product design background and it reminds me of how I work in the design studio.”
For his part, Park said, “It’s very fun. It’s fun to play other people’s games and remember the ideas for my game next year.”
Little Ezra Maciejewski, a second-grader, shared, “I learned the simplest games can sometimes be the most fun. For my game, I figured out that I could use more hot glue to make everything sturdy.”
Learning by trial and error — projects that get kids thinking and creating
As students grow older, their project designs are more sophisticated, McPhee said, sharing as an example a game designed by 9-year-old Luke Bickerton. “Luke made the most mind-blowing game experience — I invite readers to see a video of him talking about it on the school’s website wherein he discusses what he created in his own voice,” McPhee said. “The project was creative, mechanical, fun — all of those things rolled into a big ball. These projects get kids thinking and creating.”
Luke’s mother, Anne-Marie Judd, described her son’s invention: “Luke’s project was a dog-catcher game and he wanted to create a real life racing game. He created a car on a cardboard desk with a real steering wheel and accelerator and the concept is to round up all the animals and take them to the pound.”
Luke, Judd noted, “loves building and is into mechanisms. His creations are becoming more and more complex and he has started adding electronics.”
Judd explained that she and Luke’s father, “both have a background in industrial design and his dad is an inventor. We really encourage the creative process — that’s what is so great about Sycamore — it teaches kids how to think and approach problems and this project is the epitome of that.”
Luke puts a lot of thought into what game he will create every year.
“He likes the annual tradition and he starts thinking about it in the summer and puts his ideas on paper and keeps brainstorming how he’s going to do it,” Judd said. “This year, he worked on it for six weeks. It was received reallywell! His challenge this year was to create a game that had some skill involved and was not too easy for adults but also allowed preschoolers to try to play as well.”
After reflecting, Judd added, “It’s difficult as a parent to watch your kids fail and to keep their motivation up to try new things and this is one of the projects that teaches the kids that it’s OK to make mistakes. Sometimes, the only way to get to a solution is to try options a million times and eliminate some things that don’t work.”
If one chats with Luke, he learns that he enjoys the research and design process. First, he developed his concept.
“This year, I created a racing game and I chose to have players drive a dog-catcher van to try to collect dogs and return them to the pound. I called the concept ‘Pooch Pursuit,’” he said.
Then, Luke had to brainstorm about how to execute his concept.
“I had to think about the mechanisms — how the game was going to work,” he said. “I started with the steering mechanism — three ideas looked really good. The first one was rack and pinion — but I decided that would be hard to do in cardboard because it might wear off and it might slip and not work. So then I thought of having the steering wheel attached to a string and using a pulley.”
Luke explained his design concept in detail.
“When you push the steering wheel, it lengthens one side of the string and makes the other side small,” he said. “The prototype worked great, but there was a problem — I used a wire ring to put the string through it and it was adding a lot of friction and so I changed it, using small pulleys instead of rings so the string would slide better and have proper friction.”
However, Luke encountered another glitch.
“Doing it that way was much too wobbly and I couldn’t get the string in the right spot,” he said. Undaunted, he went back to using key rings, but “made them with stretchy strings so they didn’t have as much friction and would just stretch.”
Once that was solved, Luke had to add the road.
“My first idea was to use a big cylinder made of cardboard with its drum sidewise — the cylinder would be spinning so the car was in place,” he said. “However, that created curves and the driver could not see what was coming towards him, which meant it would be impossible to catch a dog.”
Undaunted, he thought of another way — using a big cardboard circle 3 feet wide and putting a motor in the middle with the car moving on the radius of the circle spinning towards the player.
Of course, Luke needed to design a car prototype, he noted.
“My first prototype was really small — it was only an inch wide and the circle was 3 feet wide,” he said, noting that was not the best design. “So, I made the car 3 1/2 feet wide and the front of the car was a big hole and you could catch the dog. I tested that and it was great!”
A few more modifications were needed. “I needed to make a big circle so I cut out two large cardboard sections and spray-mount them together,” he shared.
To complete his project Luke had to develop an accelerator so that when the player pushed down, it would go fast.
“I added one pulley connected to a first pulley that is attached to a rubber band so that when you push the accelerator down, it stretches the rubber band and spins a bar connected to a spin variable resistor — the further you push down the accelerator, the higher the electric current the battery sends to the motor. I used a 12-volt electric wheelchair battery,” he said. “We got a motor that would spin faster the further you push down the accelerator and on that steering mechanism, I put two magnets and a disc on top of the motor — the steering mechanism was on the radius of the disc, so if you put a car on the disc, it looked really cool because it used magnets so it looked like it was driving.”
Design elements were the final touches before the game was fully ready to play. “I made the dog pound in the middle of the disc and I made tiny little details, such as the car park. If a player looks inside the dog pound, he could see a guy monitoring the dogs – that’s a tiny detail that I really liked,” he said. “For the outside of the pound, I added trees and grass to make it realistic — all designed with just green sharpees on the cardboard. Then, I made the road line.”
Luke strived to design the game, “to be challenging but also to be fun!”
The goal of the game, he explained, was to collect three dogs.
“The high score was seven cars,” he said, laughingly adding, “It was crazy! I was like how’d you do that?”
Praising Luke highly, McPhee said, “If I had to bet money on one kid who would help make something amazing happen in the world 39 years from now, I would bet on Luke!”
Sycamore “strives to empower students to be analytic, imaginative thinkers, problem-solvers, and active contributors to their community,” McPhee shared. “They don’t really test kids — their philosophy is that tests are designed on a pass-or-fail basis, whereas life’s goal is to keep trying to get it right.”