SchoolArts - October 2007

FLAT PACK

As a student teacher, I introduced flat pack toy design to the sixth grade students at Curvin-McCabe Elementary

School in Pawtucket,

Rhode Island, with a design brief in the form of a digital presentation. I positioned myself as the CEO of a new toy company with a revolutionary new product, the flat pack toy, and I was looking for talented designers to build proto- types.

To explain the concept of flat pack toys, companies such as Ikea and Target were used as examples for their use of flat pack technology in packaging, which allows cus- tomers to easily transport products home in flat boxes. Combining the flat pack concept with an action figure or doll yielded the flat pack toy.

Flat pack toys are designed using a template on a single sheet of letter-sized card stock paper. Before being cut out and built into a three-

dimensional toy, they

^Flat ^pack ^toys ^are are scanned into the
designed using a computer and uploaded
_template _on _a _single to a website. With the
sheet of letter-sized ^template ^accessible_from _the _website, _any-^card ^stock ^paper.one with access to the
Internet can download
the toy template, print it, and build
their own flat pack toy.

Visual Aids to Understanding After I introduced the concept to students, we took an in-depth look at the template and how what they drew in two dimensions translated to the three-dimensional toy. To better facilitate this, each table of students had a two-sided laminated reference template on their table. On one side was an example of a figure designed using the template. The

other side was a template with large letters corresponding to each side of the toy. A built three-dimensional model with these letters accompanied the two-dimensional template.

Several students had difficulty conceptualizing the orientation of components of the body on the template and how they would change when the toy was built. I spent extra time explaining this to the class and again one-on-one with many students. It was very helpful to have the reference templates available.

Once students grasped how the template worked, they immediately got to work designing their figures. They began with pencil to allow for mistakes, and then progressed to colored pencils and markers.

I encouraged students to outline major features of their toy with black fine-tipped markers. This helped enhance those features when they transitioned into the computer and were reprinted later on.