Calling all builders
Roll up your sleeves, put on your construction hats and get ready to create with a little cardboard.
Cardboard: Build Outside the Box is a new, interactive exhibit that puts you and your imagination at the center of the experience. Our 14-foot cardboard robot will welcome you into our construction zone. There, you can build a cityscape, design your own spaceship or engineer a rocket and see how far it can fly — but the only material you can use is cardboard.
Cardboard is one of the most versatile materials. With one simple cut, fold or piece of tape, cardboard turns into anything you want it to be — all you have to do is use your imagination. Dream big and dive into all the possibilities when you step outside the box.
Cardboard: Build Outside the Box is free with admission
Join us for Building Weekends:
Crafting Tomorrow's Solutions from Today's Material
Cardboard: Build Outside the Box invites you to explore the exhibit’s different sections that encourage you to design and create with cardboard in ways you never thought possible.
- Master the art of cardboard by making stained glass creations and sculptures
- Engineer the future by designing what cars and rockets will look like in 50 years before watching them fly
- Create cardboard characters for a shadow puppet theater that you stage and produce
- Construct the Toledo of Tomorrow by creating our community’s future infrastructure out of cardboard
Get ready to unbox your creativity and discover how one simple material can inspire boundless creativity.
Sustainability Meets Creativity
Cardboard has more capabilities than what we normally see it as. Because it's made of paper fibers, cardboard can be manipulated into different shapes and configurations allowing creations from your imagination to take shape.
Cardboard: Build Outside the Box combines your creativity with the sustainability of cardboard into one exhibit. By using recycled cardboard, the exhibit helps reduce the demand for new resources, conserves energy and enhances the science center's sustainability efforts.
In partnership with Welch Packaging, all discarded cardboard in the exhibit will be properly recycled. Welch Packaging will also join the science center to teach kids how to create with cardboard, reuse cardboard and help our planet by recycling cardboard.
Cardboard: Build Outside the Box runs through Labor Day. Cardboard is free with admission.