Building Gumdrop Structures

What kid doesn’t like candy? How about building with it! Candy like gumdrops or marshmallows is ideal for building structures and sculptures of all kinds. Building gumdrop structures are also a perfect use of all that extra candy you might have leftover from a holiday {think Halloween, Christmas, and Easter}! We love easy engineering activities for kids!

BUILD GUMDROP STRUCTURES FOR STEM

Building gumdrop structures engineering activity for kids STEM

SIMPLE ENGINEERING WITH GUMDROPS

If you are looking for a screen-free, boredom buster but still a bit of educational learning activity, this one is it! Simple set up, simple supplies, and simple fun. Building structures is a great activity to incorporate STEM into play by encouraging science, engineering, and math skills to design and build gumdrop structures.

Building gumdrop structures is also an unique way to practice fine motor skills without over emphasizing the practice part. Naturally, to build the structures, your kid needs to push a toothpick into the gumdrop and fit it together with others. He thinks he is just building cool structures, but I know he is practicing finger grasps, finger dexterity, coordination, and so much more!

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Fine motor practice can happen in so many unique ways that even the most reluctant kid will fine super cool! We love using toothpicks, eyedroppers, squeeze bottles, spray bottles, and tweezers as part of our science investigations and STEM activities. You can also encourage your kid to draw their gumdrop structure or draw a design to build from!

Building gumdrop structures can be whatever you want them to be whether they look more like abstract sculptures, a dome, the Leaning Tower Of Pizza or simple shapes. In fact you can add some technology to this activity and look up structures to build. The last time we used gumdrops for engineering, we made gumdrop bridges.

Grab these free cards to add to your building activities!

GUMDROP STRUCTURES

More ideas for candy? Check out our candy science experiments or science experiments with chocolate!

SUPPLIES:

Gumdrops
Toothpicks

INSTRUCTIONS:

STEP 1. Set out a pile of toothpicks and gumdrops.

STEP 2. Poke a toothpick into the middle of the gumdrop. Attach more gumdrops and toothpicks to build your structure.

GUMDROP TOWERS

We like to build tall things with our candy structures like a gumdrop tower. Though this type of building activity is also perfect for creating 2D and 3D shapes. Get our free printable worksheet!

Check out our gumdrop rocket {sort of structure}. It was intense to build! You could also build Pool Noodle Structures for a non-edible building option.

Whether you use gumdrops, marshmallows, pool noodles, or anything else that you can poke a toothpick into, building structures is an awesome STEM activity that encourages fine motor skills, problem-solving, evaluating, and re-building!