Your Cart is Empty
If you could pilot a submarine, what would you see? This clever viewer features a scrolling underwater scene!
Cut a strip of blue paper measuring approximately 40cm long. Make sure it is slightly taller than your round window but not as tall as your cardboard box. Draw or paint an underwater scene along the length of the strip.
Place your box on the table so the window is face down. Fold the sides back up and thread both sticks through the holes, top and bottom. These will be your winders. Making sure your artwork is also face down, use a short length of sticky tape to secure one end of the long strip to the left-hand stick. Wind the strip around the stick by turning it in a clockwise direction. Tape the opposite end of the strip to the right-hand stick.
Add a rectangle of thin card to help keep your scene in place. Glue it carefully to the inside of the box, because the strip should move freely under the card.
Reassemble the box, securing with glue.
Wind the right-hand stick in a clockwise direction and your scene will move in front of your window. Turn the left-hand stick in an anti-clockwise direction to rewind. Enjoy your underwater journey!
Comments will be approved before showing up.
This competition asked you to design a secret egg hidden somewhere in nature, and your entries went far beyond the obvious nests and burrows. Eggs arrived disguised as pine cones, floating on leaf boats, perched on volcano ledges, tucked into cloud cover and even masquerading as chocolate Easter eggs to fool foxes. Thank you to every reader who took up the challenge and thought like a parent bird, fish, reptile or imaginary creature trying to keep their precious egg safe.
We were swept away by the response to this competition. Letters arrived from rivers across the world – the Thames, the Mississippi and many more unnamed waterways – each one brimming with personality, passion and a genuine love of the natural world. You gave your rivers voices that were worried, hop...
Somewhere beneath a grassy field right now, a tiny insect is building an underground loudspeaker. Male mole crickets engineer horn-shaped burrows that amplify their calls hundreds of metres into the night air – and your child can recreate the same science at home using nothing but cardboard and a phone. This hands-on experiment explores sound, shape and natural engineering in a way that is genuinely surprising. No screens, no special equipment, just a brilliant idea borrowed from nature.
