Cardboard and environmental education
Environmental education and STEAM education have similar goals — they both aim to encourage today’s students to creatively solve problems that will lead towards a sustainable tomorrow.
With Makedo, environmental education and STEAM education come together. How? By making recycled cardboard the building block of our design and making process.
We chose cardboard not only because it’s free and widely accessible (an inexpensive resource for any classroom budget) but it can also be easily reused. Giving the humble cardboard box a new purpose in the classroom.
It’s also open-ended, lightweight and relatively strong, so it's the perfect construction material for kids. Cardboard really is the ideal resource for environmental education.
STEAM projects are powerful teaching tools because they integrate curriculum areas, create opportunities for multiple disciplines, skills, dispositions and knowledge. Not to mention teamwork and imagination and it’s all through ‘doing’.
Use your classroom’s Makedo tools to saw, connect and fold cardboard and, once you’ve finished, break down the cardboard structure and transform it into something else.
Why not try a Makedo Design Cardboard Challenge to inspire creativity and reinvention? Check out The Town that Takes Care of the Planet on our HUB where Grade 3 and 4 students worked as town planners to investigate renewable energy sources and built a mini-town prototype with Makedo using recycled cardboard.
Try your own STEAM project with a focus on living sustainably and upload it to our HUB to share with others.
