On Friday, June 16, Ben and Alyssa led us in a half day of design challenges: short, one-session design sprints using various physical materials.

First off, Guinness World Record-style challenges. Who can build the longest or tallest or fastest or …? For an example of this, we used the classic marshmallow challenge with the largest marshmallows we had ever seen!

We continued our use of everyday materials by converting brown parcel paper into life-size marionettes, turning our attention to STEAM-related design challenges with bunraku-style puppets:

After challenges with paper and food, we turned to non-natural materials with a challenge involving Strawbees that demonstrated the challenge cards available from Strawbees:

And finally, we used our own in-house design cards to challenge people to solve problems with cardboard and plastic MakeDo screws:

We’ll be repeating versions of this workshop throughout the summer. If this looks like fun, we hope you’ll register for one of our free statewide workshops.

You can also find our folder of support materials here.

As always, these workshops are made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services RE-05-15-0021-15. We are grateful for their support and for their funding, via the Library of Michigan, of LSTA funds that bring us resources like the databases and electronic resources of MeL.org.

Kristin