Cereal boxes, egg cartons, paper towel rolls and refrigerator boxes have sparked the imaginations of Brentwood Park Elementary School students.
For five weeks, they’ve transformed those materials into castles, the Lorax, a car, foosball tables, pinball games, simple machines and more during the school’s first-ever cardboard challenge.
Designed to encourage students to play and learn using simple materials to build things they imagine, the Brentwood challenge is based on the Global Cardboard Challenge, an annual event inspired by the short documentary Caine’s Arcade. The film is about a boy in East Los Angeles who built his own arcade out of cardboard in his dad’s parts shop.
Brentwood principal Jillian Lewis said her staff saw it last spring at a professional development day and decided the school needed to get on board.
“It seemed like an excellent opportunity to explore an inquiry way of doing things,” she said.
The school began stockpiling cardboard last April.
“We collected cardboard anywhere we could find it,” Lewis said with a laugh.
Each class approached the challenge in its own way, with some working as a group and others taking up individual projects.
“It was completely open and organic,” Lewis said, adding the response from kids was overwhelmingly positive.
“There was no complaining about this,” she said. “Kids were engaged and wanted to do this and wanted to keep improving their creations.”
Students unveiled their work to parents and other visitors last Friday, and Lewis said the verbal feedback from parents was very positive.
“This was not a project that stayed at school,” Lewis said. “Parents knew about what their kids were working on because they were so excited while they were working on it that it was regular topics of conversation around the dinner table.”
