Making Community

As an educator and crafter, the project I love doing with my students most is paper roller coasters. What can you make with a ream of cardstock, a pair of scissors and some tape? We can make a ride for some unsuspecting marble that defies gravity, demonstrates the majesty of force and motion, and traverses time and space. And it all begins with an idea.

How do you build a community?

How do you build community in a school? How do you create a sense of togetherness, not competition, on different grade levels with students with various skills, languages, interests, and physical abilities? And, how do you do it quickly? After having attended a hack-a-thon for designing an application for non-verbal children to identify emotions, I thought I was onto something. The day-long event was a competition, and I lost soundly, but the feeling of comradery, the creative bursts of problem solving, idea generation, and prototyping I thought for sure could translate into a school event.

Organizing and conducting hack-a-thons in school is a delight and a chance to give kids a hands-on experience that taps into their own ideas and strengths. Teach a bit of coding, give a challenge, organize teams, and let them go at it. It’s a wonderful day, but not every school has the technology or the skills to pull off an event like this.

But every school has scissors.

And every school has paper.

When my colleague and I put our heads together for an event at her school in East Harlem we both came up with the idea of paper roller coasters. It would teach the design process, from idea to prototype to play test to tweaking. It would give the kids an opportunity to use skills they already had or master skills they were learning. And in the end, it would be fun, win or lose, though we made sure everyone won because just being part of the event was winning.

Our first Make-a-thon was set for right near Christmas. Together with an after-school club, we tested our theory that a paper roller coaster was buildable in a few hours with a team of four middle schoolers and enough scissors, paper and tape. We built our basic model, without any of the more intricate parts that you can find if you search up paper roller coasters on Youtube.

For the day of the event, which we named a Make-a-thon, we gathered scissors from every classroom, rulers, pens, cardstock, tape, and added other craft supplies like pipe cleaners and magic markers. We threw in some candy canes, ordered some pizza, ran a play list of dance music and in four hours we had working prototypes of paper roller coasters that were amazing, daring, creative, and successful.

We were on a roll and wanted to show the world how easy it is to create events like our Make-a-thon, and how empowering and fun the students found the challenge. We took our show on the road and worked with teachers at a private school Maker-Ed event in Pennsylvania, and in Manhattan. We had a family event with kids from elementary school, and another for high schoolers. Each event we cut paper, folded cardstock, tapped tabs to board, and let marbles roll. To add a level of complexity for the high schoolers, we added a Rube Goldberg to trigger the paper roller coaster.

I had a vision of connecting all the paper roller coasters together to make a chain, but it rains in April, when we were planning on running our event. So we had to find a space big enough to accommodate all the teachers and students. We decided to take over Tweed Courthouse on a Saturday. Students from all over Manhattan and from the five boroughs brought their skills and determination to make something magical happen.

For the younger students we set up paper chain stations. Cutting the paper, coloring the links in, we connected the links to make chains that would drop at the end of the connected paper roller coaster run. Students worked on connecting all the builds we had created at our different events. At the end of the day we ran the paper roller coasters, dropping hundreds of feet of paper chain from the second floor atrium.

Teachers who attended took the paper roller coaster challenge back to their schools. It was my pleasure to let them take all the scissors and supplies I had collected for the event and to see them used the following year at school paper roller coaster challenges. If you have some card stock and tape and at least a few good pairs of scissors you should give it a go.