Cardboard Drink Machine. Your Mini Kiosk Adventure

🎂 6 + years ⏱️ 2 h 📍 At home ⭐ challenging

Imagine going up to a drink machine. You press a button, hear a soft click, and voilà, a bottle rolls out. Exciting, right? The best part is, you can build one yourself. Out of cardboard. With a flap, a coin slot, and real 'drinks'. While crafting, you’ll not only learn how such a machine works, but you’ll also practice planning, measuring, and building like a true inventor. Plus, you can decide how your machine looks. Whether you paint it in bright colors, decorate it, or come up with names for your drinks, everything is allowed here.

What you'll need

A lot of cardboard
Watercolors and a brush
A pair of scissors
A black felt-tip pen or marker
Various drinks and cups

How it works

Find a large, sturdy cardboard box. This will be the body of your machine. Think about where the front, back, top, and bottom are. Draw a rectangle at the bottom front with a pencil. This will be the output flap later.
Carefully cut out the rectangle along three sides, leaving the top side attached. This creates a small flap that you can open and close.
Draw a small slot for coins in another part of your cardboard. Maybe at the top right. Make sure the slot is wide enough for your coins to fit through. Cut carefully along the line. Behind the slot, you’ll need a small compartment for the coins to fall into.
Draw three circles stacked on top of each other. For water, soda, cherry juice, or more circles for additional drinks. These holes will be your selection fields. You can poke dots around them with a pin to make cutting them out easier without tearing the cardboard.
Now your machine comes to life! Paint it, decorate it with colorful paper, or write prices on it. Maybe €1 for water, €2 for soda. You can also make buttons out of bottle caps.
You can use real bottles. Just make sure they fit through the output flap. When someone wants to buy a drink, they press the button, and you hand them the appropriate bottle through the flap.
Now you’re ready to go! One player is the machine or seller, who 'sells' the bottles. The other is the customer, who pays and selects a drink. The customer drops in coins, presses the button, and waits. Then you, as the machine, open the flap and hand out the drink.