How to make a geoboard
On November 6, 2011
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The geoboard that Annie made for The Cousin Who Shall Not Be Named inspired us to make one for Grace. A geoboard is a board with a bunch of pegs on it and elastic bands are stretched between the pegs. It can be used to learn basic maths skills. It is really easy to make one, and it only took us a couple of hours from start to finish (which included a trip back to the store for more spray paint).
Here is what you need,
- A piece of pegboad. We used a 600x600mm board
- Paint
- 100 5x25mm bolts (the number of nuts & bolts is size dependant)
- 200 5mm nuts
- Threadlocker (like Loctite)
- Two 8mm spanners (or one 8mm spanner and one 8mm socket wrench)
- A bag of elastics
You should probably check the hole size on the pegboard you buy before buying the nuts & bolts, just to make sure the size is okay. We bought a 1200x600mm piece with 5mm holes, and then cut it in half. Our pegboard was brown to begin with, so we spray painted it red.
There are a couple of ways to put the nuts & bolts in. The simplest way is to put the bolt in with its head on the bottom side and screw the nut on from the top (the way these people did it). It is really easy to do it that way, but we wanted to have the head at the top to make it a bit easier for Grace to work with, as well as prevent the elastics from coming off.
You need to figure out how many nuts & bolts you are going to use. We placed bolts in every third hole (a spaces in between) which gave us an 8 x 8 grid, i.e. 64 pegs. To get the head of the bolt at the top I used two nuts per bolt and tightened them on opposite sides of the board to hold the bolt upright. First you need to put a nut onto each bolt about halfway down.
Then push or screw them through the pegboard holes, with both the nut and the bolt head on the top side.
On the bottom side the bolt needs to stick through far enough for you to screw another nut onto it. Once they are all through put some thread locker on the bolts and attached a second nut to each bolt. The nut should be screwed on just far enough so that the end of the bolt and the nut are flush.
The nut that is roughly below my palm is in its final position on the bolt.
Leave the threadlocker to set. I used a high strength never-going-to-come-off threadlocker. Once it is set that nut is locked for good.
Once the nuts are set in place push (or screw) them so that the nut on the bottom side sits flush against the pegboard. Put some threadlocker on the bolt on the top side of the board and screw the nut on the top side down so that the pegboard is sandwiched between the two nuts. Hold the bottom nut with a spanner or socket and tighten the top nut.
Repeat 63 times….done! Add elastics and set child free on the geoboard.
Squares, triangles and any shape you can make on a grid, as well as the concept of one unit, two units, etc.
Also good work for little hand muscles.
Here is a video about how to build one (slightly differently), and the Filth Wizards blog they got the idea from which also has loads of other cool ideas.
