Toys from Trash
Arvind Gupta's "Toys from Trash" website features hundreds of simple, educational toy designs made from everyday discarded materials. The site provides step-by-step instructions and illustrations for building science toys, aiming to make learning accessible and fun using low-cost or waste items.
Background
Arvind Gupta is an Indian scientist, educator, and toy-maker who has spent decades designing educational toys and science experiments from discarded household items and trash (e.g., straws, rubber bands, bottle caps, old pens). His work — largely available for free on this site — aims to make science and math learning hands-on, intuitive, and accessible to children in under-resourced schools, especially in India and other developing countries. "Toys from Trash" is his well-known digital collection of hundreds of illustrated step-by-step instructions, each showing how to turn waste into working models that demonstrate principles of physics, mechanics, geometry, and biology. The project has been widely praised for its frugal innovation and has inspired science educators globally.