Creator’s Craft Challenge #1: Gingerbread Bridge
Our goal of Creator’s Craft Crate is to help kids (and adults) learn to be creators. We hope to do that through our kits (Crates), curriculum (still in development), and now these challenges.
Why Challenges?
These Challenges will be competitive in nature and competition can be a great motivator for many people.
You can see others’ submissions and seeing how others might approach the same challenge totally differently can also be a great way to learn. We can learn from their triumphs and mistakes and learn how there can be many valid ways to try to solve a problem. These lessons tend to stick extra well when we have a shared personal experience to draw from like having worked on the same project.
Many of those using our kits or curriculum are homeschooled children. We hope that by hosting community competitions, these children may be able to form connections with peers who share similar interests which can be difficult to do in the isolated setting of homeschooling.
The Gingerbread Bridge Competition Overview:
Build a "Gingerbread Bridge"
It does NOT have to be made of gingerbread or graham crackers - just has to be made out of food
Test the Breaking Point of the Bridge
Take a video of a grocery bag secured to the bridge and place full water bottles in the bag until it breaks
Post Your Video to Social Media & Fill Out a Contest Submission Form
Use BOTH hashtags
#CreatorsCraftChallenge1and#GingerbreadBridge- This makes it so that all participants can see each others’ videos and helps build our community so that we can have more participants in future challenges.Fill out a submission form - This helps me to make sure that I don’t accidentally miss any of your videos.
Not comfortable with posting on social media? - That’s fine. You can also participate by just sending me a video through the submission form.
THE PRIZE: Get Featured in a Shoutout Video on the Clean Your Craft YouTube Channel
I will feature several of my favorite builds in this video. I will show the ones that hold the most weight as well as others that I think are awesome for other reasons (beautiful aesthetics, creative use of food materials, spectacular destruction, etc.)
If you don’t get featured, don’t worry, you can try again with the next challenge.
If you don’t want attention through Social Media, you can opt out and I will instead send an email explaining what I loved about your build.
Specific Bridge Specifications:
Your bridge must be made entirely of food items: (crackers, chocolate, candy, uncooked pasta noodles, homemade cookies, etc.).
The bridge must span an unsupported gap of 2 feet (24 inches) however long you want to make it. Just mention in your video how long your bridge is.
The bridge must be able to support at least one lane for a die-cast car (like Hot Wheels or Matchbox).
It needs to be flat enough that the car can roll all the way across with just a light finger push.
The lane needs some sort of rails to retain the car so that it does not just roll off the sides.
The bridge may not be taller than 10 inches or wider than 5 inches.
If you make a bridge, we’ll be excited to see it.
Who Can Participate?
Anybody! This is mainly intended for school-age kids, but anyone of any age can participate. The bridges can be built by an individual or by a family or class group. I will consider the ages of the builders and number of builders when picking my favorite bridges for the shoutout video since a bridge built by younger or fewer builders is more impressive.
If you would like, you can even do your own mini-competition within your own family or class and then post a single video showing all of the bridges in the competition. The point is just to have fun and improve your problem solving and making skills.
How to Submit:
Build a bridge that fits the specs above. Make sure that it fits the die-cast car requirement.
You don’t have to provide evidence of the bridge conforming to the specs, but please make sure that it does.
Film a quick presentation of your bridge. ( ideally 40 seconds or less)
Make sure to say the following as part of the presentation:
Your Name as well as the name(s) of the other builders (if any).
How long your bridge is.
Your favorite features about the bridge you made. These can be structural features, aesthetic features, or even reasons why you think the broken pieces will taste good.
If your bridge was build by a group, just pick one spokesperson to present the bridge. If you built it as a family, let one of the kids present the bridge.
Film your destructive test of the bridge.
With the camera rolling, add water bottles to the bridge until it breaks. Use full 16.9 ounces (500 mL) water bottles. If you don’t have this size on hand, you can use any size, just state the volume of the bottles being used so that we know how much weight the bridge held
You can place the water bottles directly on the bridge or hang them from lightweight bags (like a disposable or re-usable grocery bag).
Keep the weight relatively evenly distributed over the length of the bridge. Add weight to the center first, then move to the sides.
Post a video to YouTube or Instagram Reels that includes both the presentation and testing of the bridge. (Or send an email to cleanyourcraft@gmail.com if you don’t want the video on social media.)
The total video should ideally be shorter than 5 minutes
Include both hashtags in your post caption:
🔖#CreatorsCraftChallenge1
🔖#GingerbreadBridgeIf you want to include other things like a timelapse or pictures of building the bridge, you can, but it is not required.
Fill out this Submission Form
The submission deadline is May 18th 2025. I will post the shoutout video of my favorite entries on the YouTube Channel on May 30th. Subscribe to the Channel to get notifications for when the video is posted.