Upcycling Textbooks

What started as a personal passion project turned into a guerilla-style, creative social movement. Students & artists transformed textbooks into "something better" and Chegg gifted us an 18-wheeler full of 35,000 old textbooks.

Upcycling Textbooks turned into an epic adventure that sparked conversations and questions about higher education, learning technology and creativity (three of my favorite topics). There were Halloween mask-making workshops, origami contests, and a very busy photo booth at SXSW EDU filled with upcycled textbook props. Artists requested textbooks to join in and blew our minds. There was a community jam session with a “textbook guitar,” a covert operation to fill potholes with textbook papercrete, a guy cooking eggs in his “textbook solar oven,” a jack-o-lantern pinata filled with school supplies, rocket-building challenges (and 700’ launches) with NASA’s Space Center Houston, and an Upcycling Textbooks presentation to some 5,000 educators at 820 China Education Festival in Shanghai…

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This Used To Be A Textbook

“You learn a lot about paper in the process of building a working model rocket from a discarded textbook,” said Speed Reader designer and builder, Hans “Chris” Michielssen.

With the help of an Estes D12-5 engine, and a cheering crowd, Speed Reader reached approximately 700 glorious feet on its maiden flight at NASA’s Space Center Houston.