Cardboard Air Hockey Table [MakerID-28]

Cardboard Air Hockey Table

by Tyler, Henri, Rocco

The team clearly working on the air hockey table

Our  Maker Fair project is to create a working Air Hockey table that doesn’t cost anything but the materials in the science room, but still functions well enough to play.

Our inspiration came from an idea. We wanted to make a game, but not make a full blown game, like maybe just an air hockey table. But not a full blown air hockey table either. We just wanted to make a functional air hockey table that wouldn’t require too many materials

In our first process of deciding what our team was gonna build, we were deciding between an air hockey table, a Rube Goldberg, and a guitar. Henri and I didn’t like guitar, and Rocco didn’t like Rube Goldberg machine, so we decided on an air hockey table. We started working immediately. The first thing we did was we made a cardboard prototype about one foot wide and two feet long. We poked holes in the cardboard with nails to let the air through. We put a fan under it and held down the cardboard. We created a test foam puck to see if it would move easily against the cardboard’s surface with the air on and it did.. Our finished project will most likely be 2 fans long (the big square ones stored in the upper science room) give or take a couple of inches.

We encountered a problem with the fan. When the fan is lying down on a table or a floor, less air gets sucked in and the fan gets less air to blow into the air hockey table, which alters gameplay majorly!

The things we had to work around  were the materials. We learned how to problem solve and to find  these work arounds for materials we did not have like using fans from the 6th grade science class. Also, we did not have slippy-slidey materials, so we had to improvise on our own with cardboard (it actually worked surprisingly!)

Thing we would like to do in the future with this project if we had more time would be the fact that we would want to make it more legit. Our team can all agree that we would want to make it bigger, and use materials that would make it feel like more of an air hockey table. Not just a cardboard one..

For anybody who also want to do this, this is our advice to you : This is fun, you should do it! But make sure you plan it out before you start. This is a good project to do, because the materials are easy to gather, because you can find them in your house (most likely!) The only materials we needed were 2 fans and cardboard, which pretty much equaled up to 0 dollars spent!