St. Martin's Day Lantern Light Play

For the past four years, I’ve been living in Germany and over that time, it’s been interesting to see local traditions and festivals that have potential as jumping off points for tinkering explorations. One of my favorite is the St. Martin’s Day event where kids make lanterns (often from recycled materials) and parade through the streets of the city.

Last year I worked on a lantern that combined elements of plastic fusing with a solar powered garden light. For this year I wanted to tinker with my young son to build a lantern that he could carry around in the parade. We used cardboard, parchment paper, crayons and light play objects to make the design. Once we had the four walls done we used hot glue to put them together and added a cardboard top with a wire hook to attach the lantern to a stick.

For the lights, I did a version of the Glow City project in The Tinkering Workshop and built a cardboard base for the lantern and added copper tape, battery packs and LEDs. At first I was planning to use a micro:bit to control the lights but it ended up being too complicated and unnecessary to get intricate light patterns.

The lantern turned out as something similar a bit of a personal and portable light play box. The combination of white lights and flashing RGB LEDs created an interesting scene where the shadow casting objects seemed to move and change shape in the windows.

And then of course the fun part was to take out our homemade lantern and join a local St. Martin’s Day parade. We got inspired by other designs and came up with new ideas to try for next year. I think that this community event brings that final “social scaffolding” to the tinkering experience where you want to make your own individual project which also let’s be part of something larger than yourself. I’m looking forward to more STEAM based ideas for tinkering with these festive lanterns in the coming years.