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Makedo Cardboard Building System

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Reusable connectors for cardboard creations

The cardboard boxes that come as packaging for my family’s numerous online purchases were formerly an annoying nuisance, piling up until we could cut them apart and add them to the recycle bin. But for the kids at my wife’s school, cardboard is a wonderful construction material. Thanks to Makedo’s plastic screws, this cardboard can be magically transformed into the raw material for forts, castles, suits of armour, etc. A Makedo building kit comes with a serrated plastic knife (non-pointy for extra safety), for cutting up the cardboard, thirty plastic screws that can be used to hold layers of cardboard together, and a special screwdriver that works on these plastic screws. Nothing is sharp enough to hurt the kids. Even sitting on the pointy end of a screw would merely be uncomfortable. Equipped with these simple tools, it’s amazing to see what the kids can do with cardboard. Eventually, the cardboard constructs get left out in the rain, lose their structural integrity, and must be tossed away. When this happens, the bright blue screws are easy to spot and and remove from the junk cardboard, keeping lost screws to a minimum. We buy ours from Lee Valley Tools, but I think Makedo’s construction tools are widely available from other suppliers too. A full set is under $20.

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-- Scott Reid 12/12/17

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