Pens, Pencils, Paperclips

Can you build a boat from pens, pencils and paperclips? Will it float?

This challenge is to build a boat with pens, pencils, and paperclips or any combination thereof. The challenge is 1) see if it floats, 2) see how much weight it will hold before sinking -- use coins as your weights.

Caution: placing pens in water may affect their ability to write.

Good luck!

Cards and Straws

Build the largest structure you can and send it's measurements in with your pictures. You may use -- one box of paperclips, one bag of straws, and one deck of cards.

Good luck!

Paper and Pencils Solutions

We had marvelous participation this week and some magnificent solutions.

Abundant congratulations to:

Orca, Alce, Zee, Boo, Jonathan

Just Pencils and Paperclips

Put a handful of pencils and paperclips on the table.

The challenge is to make something -- anything. If it has articulated components that is even better!

Good luck.

Week Two -- More Submissions

This is another great submission by Tessa!

Week Two -- Our first two participant entries!

I have been reading Lapaz Home Learning's Blog for a while now and always find great inspiration there. I am so excited that Lapaz Home Learning completed our paperclip challenge and came up with these!

Superboy's Paperclip Zebra:



JBug's Paperclip Mini Musical Triangle:



Thanks for participating! Our next challenge will be posted on Sunday!

Week Two -- Paper Clips

If you are still working on Week One's challenge, keep it up and don't forget to email your photos and measurements. We'll post ours shortly. As for Week Two, the challenge is: put a handful of paperclips on a table and make something with them.

Don't forget to take a picture and email it to us by next weekend (although for the first few weeks of this, we won't turn any late entries away).

Have fun. Be creative. Think!

And, if you are looking for ideas of other things to do with paperclips, go here or read about these creations or these.

Update: Our solution was not what we expected! First, I tossed a bunch of paperclips on the table.

We planned to make a wire person that might look something like this. But as we opened the paperclips, they all broke. So, we decided to just create a more 2 dimensional picture on the table. We put a piece of white paper underneath so that we could photograph it. Here it is: