Arts & Creativity

A plastic bottle, two wooden spoons and some string are all it takes to build a bird feeder you can watch from indoors.

A store-bought game arrives with its pieces already made. Design and build your own instead, including one that changes shape mid-game.

Five common kitchen ingredients make playdough you can knead food coloring into, in as many colors as you like.

Fold one sheet of paper into a dart and you have built a flying machine. Every crease helps or hurts how it flies, and testing shows you which.

A paper wing is a flat sheet. A flat sheet pushes nothing anywhere. So how does it push air down — and why does the trick suddenly stop working?

A comic is a story told mostly in pictures, split into panels. Plan one, draw it, finish it. Six finished panels beat sixty abandoned ones.

Join up multiples of a number around a circle of dots and a spiral appears. A different multiple draws a completely different one.

Paint one wing, fold the paper, and press. The wet paint copies itself onto a side it never touched. That is one line of symmetry at work.

A flipbook is a stack of still drawings. Not one of them shows anything moving. Flick them and something moves anyway, and it is worth knowing who did that.

Drawing a road that goes away from you looks impossible until you find the single dot that every edge in the picture is aiming at.

You drew nothing in the white strip between two panels. A story happened there anyway, and your reader is the one who put it there.

A note tells you two things: which sound to make, and how high or low. Both come from seven letter names and where the note sits on the staff.

A plucked string gives you a note. A tapped drum gives you a thud. Both are just something wobbling, so the difference is in what comes with it.

Some pairs of notes settle the moment you play them and others grind. The difference is arithmetic, and it is small whole numbers doing the work.

Tap a pencil at a steady speed and you will start hearing ONE two, ONE two. Nothing in the tapping says that. You put it there.

Swap every letter for a different one and nobody else can read your message. Agree the swap with a friend beforehand and you are set.

A riddle only works if every clue in it is true. Describe a familiar thing so exactly that your friend pictures something else until the last clue.

A scrambled alphabet falls in an afternoon, and nobody tries a single key. Swapping letter names hides which letter is which, never how often it is used.

The red you see is the one colour the tomato refused to keep. Everything else went in and stayed there, which makes red the leftovers.

Hold your hand near a wall and its shadow is crisp. Move it away and the edge goes soft. The hand did not change, so the softness came from the lamp.

Mix all your paints and you get a brown-black sludge. Mix all the colours of light and you get white. Both answers are right.