Balancing sculptures

Let's make a balancing sculpture using random things that are lying around in the house. This activity guide introduces a few explorations with different materials, trying different models to understand weight, balance and its relation to gravity intuitively, and hopefully helps ignite the adventurous nature in you!

Learning Goals

Understand balancing, stability, weights, and surfaces of different objects.
Explore the center of mass and center of gravity of objects and how balancing depends on them (9th standard Physics students can directly connect with these two principles).

Activity Resources

Materials Required

Scissors
Few sticks
Threads
Random things from around the house

Age Groups

This activity is suitable for ages 8 years & up.

Facilitation Tips

Introduce the activity with help from demo videos and engage participants in discussion by asking following questions:
What factors are helping make a successful balancing sculpture in the demo video?
What happens when you increase or decrease the length of the wire in the demo video?
Where have you seen a balancing sculpture like this in real life?
What are the different objects that you will explore for balancing, other than the one shown in the demo video?

Some more ideas to explore are to try with stones, pebbles, empty boxes, cartons, beads of different shapes and sizes. Before you start building the sculpture, explore the weights of the objects by keeping them on your palms. Trying to balance each small object at the tip of your finger can also be fun to start with. You can make various sculptures with the same set of things by balancing them, stacking, tying, or hanging.

Inspire participants by sharing local and international artists' work, who are into balancing sculptures or art. See below for examples.

Browse through the facilitator guide for tips and tricks to engage participants in maker activities in a virtual or physical learning space.

View facilitator guide

Inspiring artists

Mansi Singh Panwar is a Bhavai dance artist, a popular folk dance genre performed in Rajasthan and western India. She has been performing this dance since the age of 6 that she learned from her mother. In this dance, she balances up to 22 earthen pots on her head, performs on the edge of the sword, on the rim of a metal plate, and more. She can perform balancing for up to 1 hour. Mansi says balancing comes with a lot of practice and patience. She has performed in 10+ countries outside India. Watch here for more.