Project-Based Learning: Cardboard Connections
Working together during the 24-25 academic year, Lincoln Middle School’s seventh-grade math, science, and English teachers created Game On! Designing Arcade Games, a project-based learning game-building project for the entire grade. That’s 270 students.
Bahala sponsored the first part of the project: the cardboard cutting workshops given to all 7th graders during their science class. The Rediscover Center provided the teachers, expertise, and supplies.
Zabrina—a Rediscover Center intern-turned-hire—invited each student to create a 3-D scene using six construction techniques: L-brace, Flange, Gusset, Flap, Slot construction, and Sistering/reinforced layers.
She held up a cardboard tray showcasing each of the six technique templates. “You don’t have to make something exactly like each one of these, but the models will be on each table to give you ideas.” Zabrina demo’d tricks for using cardboard cutting scissors: “Because cardboard is so thick, you have to make a double notch so you can fold pieces back.”
Jim, senior staff at Rediscover, demonstrated a technique for one table full of students. “Open up”—he made a small cut and folded it back—“and you have really strong connections.”
The metaphors abounded, as they often do, especially when specialized, exacting language enters the chat.
Students were into the project from the jump. “Guys, stop distracting yourselves,” I heard one say to the group—and it worked. Another makeshift leader rallied their tablemates: “C’mon we only have nine minutes!” Drifting to another table, I heard one ask another, “Do we need hot glue? No, we use tape,” mixed in with teen slang (I heard many exclamations of “skibidi,” a fluid word that relies on context to be understood as positive or negative).
Can I use the pencil real quick?
Look what I made for my bridge! Cool!
One student cut through an empty tape roll to use parts of it. This shape proved popular.
Rose Moe, Lincoln Middle School math teacher and project co-lead, was pleased with the outcomes. "The workshops helped students apply math and science to their builds using geometry and experimentation with measuring, scaling, and testing,” she said. “The workshops gave the students the confidence to see themselves as true makers.”
Patrick, the third Rediscover Center staff member present, said, “It’s great to be partnering with Bahala and other orgs like Create Now.” A former actor, Patrick applies his experience building sets to running workshops. “It’s fun and important to learn, or really to practice, how to apply design principles to real life using what’s readily usable within inherent limitations.” He laughed. “It’s not a huge pivot from acting on set: it’s all performance training.” A student asked him for an empty tape roll and Patrick handed it over. “I don’t mean performance in the fake or precious sense,” he said. “It’s practicing what it’s like to be a person, which is actually How do I pretend to be a person, how do I wayfind, to become myself.”
A lot of the process of becoming involves trying new things, playing within just the right amount of structure. “Cardboard is not a precious material, so you can make mistakes and iterate with low stakes,” Patrick said. “And those stakes sometimes turn into cool stuff.” Jim excitedly showed me a photo from a previous class. Playing around, two students lay one sistered shape atop the other. Together they’d made a fantastic snake.
Jody Howard, Lincoln Middle School English teacher and project co-lead, underscored the magic of mundane materials. “The workshops unlocked students’ creativity by showing them the potential that exists all around them, even in cardboard!”
“It’s rare to have an entire curriculum just using cardboard,” Jim said. “But it reinforces”—ha—”the idea that the material doesn’t matter, the act of making does.” A cardbox-making company invited Jim and other senior staff from Rediscover Center to look at the machines “like a Mister Rogers episode.” There, they learned that the average cardboard box has been processed seven times. Real recycling! And no, it doesn’t always work. At other schools, Jim has seen carefully separated recyclables thrown into one dumpster due to a nonworking system, not bad intentions.
Jim coordinates with pizzerias because the tops of pizza boxes are usually clean and a great shape to use in classrooms. He also checks the dumpsters by school cafeterias. Zabrina also works at Levi’s and has access to lots of cardboard boxes. Bike shops are also great resources for cardboard. From there, human hands and imagination—and space, time, and encouragement—transform humble materials into something with value and tangible heft.
At just one table, this was the following collection of made-objects: a large letter L out of an L-brace (“a collaboration of all we’ve learned and done,” one of them explained); a lighthouse; a futuristic house/spider/bracelet/toilet; a car with wheels plus a ramp; a manor scene, complete with a stream-straddling bridge; and a usable picnic basket.
The fantastic ideas-turned-objects alchemized ordinary, ubiquitous cardboard into steel, glass, concrete, wicker, and stone—even flowing water.
A creative writer who had recently attended USC’s Wrigley Institute Julymester on Catalina Island, Zabrina and I spoke about how important flow is to creativity. Immersed in nature while writing poetry made her fiercely protective of the environment. An internship at Ground Education, a sustainable gardening nonprofit in Long Beach, followed. “Rediscover and Ground Education taught me, or hammered home, how much ‘growing’ can happen with literal dirt and stuff people usually throw away.”
The cardboard-cutting workshops and visit to Two Bit Circus gave students the skills and inspiration they needed to bring their arcade game ideas to life. The project wrapped up with a lively showcase where families gathered to play and celebrate the students’ creative creations.
Five minutes before the end of class, Patrick took examples from each workstation and taped them to, yes, another piece of cardboard as the new collection of templates. The seventh graders beamed, pointed. “That’s mine! That’s theirs!”
Bahala, SMMUSD, and Rediscover Center continue to partner on fun projects with students and adults.