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Cardboard Boat Building

Cardboard Boat Building

Min number of participants 4
Age 10+ yrs.
Safety support by adult Recommended
Min duration 1 h
Cost Low
Environment Outdoor

Teams design and build a boat from cardboard and tape alone, then race it across a pool or lake to see whose engineering — and waterproofing — holds up best.

The Essentials

How to play

  1. Give each team a fixed stock of cardboard, packing tape, and box cutters — no other flotation material and no glue that dries too slowly to use in a timed build.
  2. Set a build time of 45-90 minutes for teams to design and construct a boat meant to carry at least one person.
  3. Cover every seam and surface that will touch water with tape — cardboard survives a race only if water genuinely can't get in.
  4. At race time, one crew member per boat, wearing a life jacket, paddles or is pushed across a set course in a pool, calm lake, or similar shallow, supervised water.
  5. The boat that finishes the course while staying afloat wins; if multiple boats sink, whichever traveled farthest before going down is the winner instead.

Tips

  • Always require a life jacket on the rider and have a spotter or lifeguard-capable adult supervising the water at all times — this is a genuine water safety activity, not just a craft project.
  • A wide, flat-bottomed hull design is far more stable and harder to capsize than a narrow canoe shape.
  • Tape every seam on both the inside and outside — a single untaped gap is usually where the boat starts taking on water.
  • Great for team building: it combines real engineering trade-offs (weight vs. buoyancy vs. stability) with a genuinely funny, high-stakes public test of the result.
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