Today little Bear has joined one of the great workshops of MuDa (Museum of Digital Art, Zürich), called 'Toilet Paper Roll Engineering". The idea is that kids learn simple engineering skills by building a rollercoaster made up of toilet paper rolls.
For similar projects check https://muda.co/zurich/
It started as a 1,5 hours workshop, but quickly became a whole day entertainment for little Bear. At the planning and the beginning of creating, a 6 years old needs help, but afterwards it entertains them for hours.
This is all what you need if you would like to try:
Toilet paper rolls (a lot!), maybe kitchen paper rolls, scissors, tape.
The big learning part part for a 6 years old is to understand that engineering is not just "making", but also the planning part beforehand. Important to explain a bit the force of gravity, so they understand how the marble (or wooden ball) will roll down the rollercoaster, and that it is important to plan the place and hight of the pillars, the shape of the rollercoaster before starting to build them.
As a first step we cut little slots at the bottom of the paper rolls, folded the little legs out to create a strong base for the pillars, which can be fixed to a cardboard. A cardboard or some kind of a base is important, so you can move away the rollercoaster from the table once it is ready, especially if you would like to use your table ever again!
We created several pillars, put them in the order of height, arranged them on the cardboard base. For the track, we cut into half the tubes lengthwise. Before taping the pillars down, we planned the extra elements like a turn, tunnels. Once we planned those, started to tape down the pillars. For a simple long tunnel we just taped two rolls together and squeezed the track through the tunnel. For a more exciting, but short tunnel, we cut two large holes on the two opposite sides of a paper roll and again squeezed the track through the holes.
The biggest task was to create the turn of the track. We tried taping smaller pieces together, but did not work so well, so finally we cut small triangle shaped slots into the side of the track, pulled the two sides of the triangles together. The carton tube tries to gain back its shape, so taping is not strong enough, we used a stapler instead.
When the basic elements were planned, we taped everything together and did a few test runs. Changed a few bits and bobs, for example reduced the height of some pillars by cutting a deeper hole to hold the track. When it was done, we did the final test and it worked!
Then again we added new elements: hanged a small bell (from the neck of the Easter chocolate bunny) above the track, so whenever the ball passes, the bell rings. We also added a short track piece going up, opposite the end of the main track, which stops and holds the ball at the end, so we do not have to crawl on all fours to find the ball at the end of each run.
This was the point when I thought that the project was over and left to the kitchen to cook, but this is when it all started for our little Bear.
He decorated the rollercoaster with some ninja pictures he found from his themed birthday party, created flags made of paper and straw.
He also populated the roller coaster with Playmobil figure viewers, with loads of cars for the police, the medical team - important participants for a 'major event'. He was drawing dedicated parking places for the cars. Created two helipads for the helicopter responsible for filming the event....
... a few hours later he is still drawing, cutting and taping, who knows if this project will ever end?
