Although we don’t often have rain on the day of our spring fair, it does happen. As a result, we always choose a game that can be played indoors. Designing the game and its rules is always a learning experience as well as a lot of fun. In the last few years, we linked that game (whatever it was) to the “Flush Bucket” activity — one in which a volunteer adult or student sits under a water-filled bucket attached to the basketball back outside of the library. When someone wins the game, students ring the dreaded gong and pull the rope that dumps the bucket. Sadly, this was one of those rare rainy years, so we had an indoor fair. The Flush Bucket stayed in storage.  The fair was great fun, nonetheless, and one of the incidental benefits was that parents had a chance to see all of the classrooms as they toured the games and other activities.

Our first game involved making a pachinko board, which is kind of like a primitive pinball game. I had built a little one for the class during the “Workbench” minicourse a few weeks ago, hoping (in vain) that kids in the minicourse would be inspired to make one of their own.

Kids have played this one constantly in the classroom, however, so building a big one for the fair was a choice that the group endorsed. A 2 by 4 foot piece of MDF seemed like a good starting place, and we thank Mike Batchelor for getting it for us.

After we framed the MDF with some 1 by 5 pine, it was time to work on the interior obstacles. During several choice times, kids used soft-tack putty to position assorted items and see how the marbles rolled. As always, they thought of clever ways to use things from our maker area that would never have occurred to me.

There were five compartments at the bottom of the board. Were they equally likely to end up with a marble? We did a lot of data-gathering. By now, most of our kids know that a data sample has to be large in order to give a valid indication of the pool it represents. How many times (“What percent?”) did a marble end up in each of 5 compartments? The first few rounds seemed to favor one compartment. After a lot of rounds were played, we could see that four of the compartments were fairly equal in likelihood, while the fifth was much more difficult to hit. We discussed changing the pieces but finally decided to make that elusive compartment worth more points.  Students secured the pieces with hot glue, and we were ready to move on.

Creating the rules for play is always an interesting process. Students invariably start out with ideas that are so complicated that the fair would be over by the time they finished explaining how the game worked. We reminded them that we wanted the game to take some time — that kids will run through their supply of game tickets too quickly if the game’s playing time is too short.  We finally settled on giving players 10 marbles. Getting two into each of any four compartments would get a prize ticket. Getting a marble into the difficult fifth compartment would get another prize ticket, and more than one there would get two prize tickets. Among other things, these rules meant that there was the possibility of winning something right on up to the last marble, even if there was no hope of having two marbles in four of the compartments. The game was not only fun to play but also fun to watch, so we had a lot of observers as well as players throughout the day.

Our second game involved mounting some cones and rings on a tilted board, supplies that we had used for a previous fair. It went through similar testing and rule-creation. It wasn’t as successful, in part because it was very hard to win (despite our best efforts to make it more playable). Still, it was another activity that would be helpful for a day in which kids were not going to spend a lot of time running around outside.

This is a side note about the kind of community we are. Partway through the day, one of our students brought me a twenty-dollar bill that she had picked up off the floor. I asked the adults and children in the room at that time if anyone had dropped it, and — after a few adults checked their cash — all said it wasn’t theirs. A while later, a former student came up to ask if her father’s lost twenty had been found in our room, and I was happy to hand it to her. Trust and honesty are intrinsic to the way we engage with each other. I think we are exceptional in that regard.

We want to thank Deborah and the rest of the office staff for spending a lot of time figuring out how to best use our indoor spaces and motivate parents to come out on a dismal day. Their hard work before, during, and after the fair made it a success. Although we all hope for only sunny days for our fair in the future, they have created a plan that will stand up to any storm.