Hi,

This year my wife and I spent a big chunk of our spare time developing a school holiday program for kids aged between 9 and 14. The program is called Kraftworks for Kids and is craft-based.

Our original intention was to base the program on plaster-casting. This soon expanded to other materials and mediums. In October Denny, master of all things cardstock, agreed to let us use WorldWorksGames model kits in the program. By the time we were ready to run the two week trial of the program in early December we had cardstock, metal (figurines), plaster, plastic, and wooden scale model kits. In all we have more than 100 kits for the kids to choose between.

The two week trial of our school holiday program has just finished. It was exhausting -- and so much fun. Anyway I thought I'd share some details with you regarding kids and cardstock modelling.

Firstly, the WWG cardstock kits. We made available the following kits:

d20 - Citizens of Himmelveil
d20 - Missing Persons
d20 - Pirate Crew
Fantasy - Castle (a subset of CWU)
Fantasy - Harbormaster
Fantasy - Pubs and Inns
Fantasy - Siegeworks
Fantasy - Villageworks
Modern - Downtown
Modern - Streets of Mayhem
SciFi - First Light
SciFi - Red Sector

We had the kits printed professionally, three copies of each kit. The instructions were printed on 90 gsm bond, double-sided, full colour, edge-to-edge printing and were stapled together. The models were printed on 240 gsm cardstock. The instructions were shrink-wrapped with the model pages.

We were very pleased with the results. The colours were vivid and the cardstock was a pleasure to use. To get the kits printed we had to amalgamate all the instruction PDFs for the kit into a single instruction PDF. We inserted chapter pages and a title page. Next time we'll produce a Table of Contents and a full colour cover for the instruction manuals. We also had to amalgamate the model pdfs into a single model pdf. As you'll be aware most kits require certain model pages to be printed more than once. We had to insert multiple copies of these pages into the model PDF so that the kit could be produced in a single pass.

As you can imagine creating the new PDFs required many hours work. However it minimized the print cost and reduced the chances of model kits being delivered that were incomplete. For those that are interested the 12 kits required around 800 cardstock pages and nearly a thousand pages of instructions (500 pages printed double-sided). Buying three copies of each resulted in a per-page print price of AU$0.43 per cardstock page and AU$0.38 per instructional page (double-sided). In kit terms, this meant that the Citizens of Himmelveil cost AU$5.65 to produce while Red Sector cost AU$81.32. Add on to this the cost of the PDF purchase from WWG plus burning to CD (each kits includes the original WWG product burned to CD) and Red Sector cost just over AU$100.oo to produce.

Here's something you don't see every day:



WWG model kits are quite large so they occupy one of the three kit tables in the registration area. During the trial we trained four Leaders in each of the kit types (none of the leaders had made a model plane before let alone a cardstock model) so we broke open one of the cardstock kits (a copy of the Castle kit which is a subset of CWU) and let them have a try. There were varying levels of success amongst the leaders.

During the trial none of the kids selected a cardstock kit. This was due to the fact that parents chose to book their children into the program in an ad hoc manner rather than booking a number of days at the start and giving their kids a chance to select one of the larger kits. The net result was that the kids chose small kits that they could finish in a day as they were never certain that they were coming back. Anyway, to give them a taste of cardstock modelling we let them work on the Castle kit that the leaders had been playing with. Without a shadow of a doubt the kids were better at cardstock modelling than the new leaders we were training. They didn't have the same level of coordination as the leaders but they did read the instructions, they were patient, they persisted with the project, and when they needed help they asked for it. Unlike the leaders!



Lots was learned during the trial, many things we'll change before we run the program "full-scale" in 2008. Next year we will have kids booked in to the program for five or more days over the fortnight that we run the program. I think this will provide more opportunity for the kids to try cardstock modelling. We'll also add colourful covers to the cardstock kits so that the kids can see what can be made with each kit. We'll also make sure that at least one of the leaders is an experienced cardstock modeller.

Regards,

I can definately appreciate what you're saying about personality and temperment having a big influence on whether it's a suitable project or not.

I was definately one of those patient, meticulous kids. My dad had me using the real tools in his workshop by age 9, and I was using a "hot pot" to melt lead and cast my own minis by 12.

I'm not so sure I'll let my own son do the same, though. He doesn't seem to have the attention span for it.