It’s been pretty amazing to see all the good things come out of the Caine’s Arcade hype this year.  Like how his foundation plans to hold a Global Cardboard Challenge Day in October.  I thought it would be fun to tinker in the craft lab to see what cardboard creation I could come up with.  Since most of the boxes Caine uses are pretty large, I wanted to keep my project small, like a toy.  And so this is what I put together.

The Marble Drop Game uses up a cereal box, a couple of paper towel tubes, half of a plastic report sleeve, metallic acrylic paints, as well as other common items found in the home.  I don’t plan to list out the materials and complete procedure on how to put it together since I pretty much documented the steps here in photos.  I will share a few notes but if you’re curious about a particular step, feel free to leave your questions in a comment below.

Steps 3-6 show how I block the ends of the tubes.  I only block one end of the bottom tube because I want the marbles to roll out of the other end.  The “curtains” made of rubber bands (14) are there to keep the marbles from rolling out of the toy but still allow the tubes to be tilted up and down.  Gray electrical tape is used to decorate the outside of the cereal box.  And the last photo above (15) shows how I glued the final cog shape after placing the top tube in.

This is a great problem-solving toy.  Drop the marble into the top hole and try to figure out how to get it out of the bottom tube.  Like most puzzles, it took my kids several attempts to figure out the solution and will play with it time and time again.

We would love to see everyone’s cardboard challenge creations too so leave a link in the comments section to yours.

Have fun!