Safety first! Melting plastic can be harmful to our lungs if the fumes linger. Make sure your patrons know you have their best interests in mind by providing a well-ventilated room, or work outside while doing this activity. This will allow them to keep their minds on the design rather than on their future health.

Using no-cost, upcycled, perhaps abundant materials (gleaned from tasty snack foods!) lowers the risk of participants getting frustrated. When participants mess up a project, there's plenty more material to use—and all of it would have ended up in the landfill anyhow, so no harm, no foul! Encourage your patrons to make mistakes, because there’s loads more plastic packaging available to keep on trying until they get used to this material. Think about celebrating the mistakes with a Whoopsy Wall or Perseverance Gallery, where those bold attempts that didn’t work out are celebrated.

One nice advantage of inflatables is how familiar examples are, yet we don’t often think about how inflatable structures are made. Dollar stores and party specialty shops often have a variety of mylar balloons, inflatable hats, swim floats, and three-dimensional paper structures that might inspire your patrons in an unexpected direction. It's interesting to look at what flat shapes combine to make a 3D topology, and these examples are often inexpensive enough that you can even let your participants treat them as another material to hack and remix!

Plastics and other lightweight materials have been sculpted into a dizzying array of out-of-this-world shapes. Some inflatables are easy to buy or borrow, but even if you don’t have the budget to buy, you can share a gallery of inspiring images of inflatable rafts, bounce houses, floating parade balloons, and fancy mylar-and-helium sculptures in a rotating slideshow.

The physics and engineering concepts underlying this project are profound, but it’s best to maintain an informal, friendly, lightweight tone for this introduction to pneumatics. Keep the conversation focused on creating the form and function through experimentation and craft. Relevant books to have on hand can include origami, pop-up book crafts, balloon animal sculpting, three-dimensional design (like product development and architecture), and even some hippie books about inflatable architecture—for example, we love the Inflatobookbook by Ant Farm. There are also a ton of inspiring videos about soft robotics to share: check out this video from Nature that explains the topic using several examples!