Physics for Makers

The structure is project-first, which is the whole point. Instead of reading a chapter about levers and then answering questions about levers, your student builds a working pegboard pinball machine, watches the ball do something unexpected, and then goes to the text to find out why. Unit 1 is Motion and Forces and comes with the Car Launcher and Friction Flick crates. The rest of the year works the same way, one crate or two per topic. Beta families report settling into roughly one unit a month, which lines up with a normal 36-week year without anyone drowning in February.

The online textbook is where the teaching actually happens, and it's color-coded so you can see at a glance what's an equation, what's a hands-on activity, what's optional, and what's the harder stretch material. Every math step has a video solution. That matters more than it sounds like it should. If you haven't touched physics since 1998 and your teenager gets stuck on a kinematics problem at 9pm, there is a video showing the work instead of you and a search engine trying to reconstruct it together.

The crates are laser-cut wood, made in the USA, and built to be taken apart and rebuilt instead of glued together once and shelved. Each one also ships with activities adapted down to K-2, so your younger kids can legitimately do something with the same box while the high schooler works the real assignment. That is unusual and it's a real budget argument for a multi-kid house. The crates fold flat, which anyone who has lost a closet to science kits will appreciate.

Pricing is $500 on pre-order (regular $700), covering all 16 crates plus lifetime access to the course, and there's a 15% discount at four or more units for co-ops. If you want to try before committing, the Unit 1 sample runs $75 for two crates and the full first unit, and buying the sample gets you a code that applies the cost toward the full curriculum. The crates are also sold individually from the crates collection on their site, running $16 to $45 apiece, so you can put a single Car Launcher or Pegboard Pinball in front of your kid and see whether the format lands before you commit to a year of it. Creator's Craft Crates is also an approved vendor for a long list of ESA and education savings programs, including Arizona ESA, Arkansas EFA, Florida's FES-UA and PEP, Georgia Promise, Louisiana GATOR, Utah Fits All, West Virginia HOPE, and Wyoming ESA. In those states the whole thing can come out of ESA funds.

The honest cautions: this is a brand new curriculum from a brand new company. Official release is September 1, 2026, so families buying now are pre-ordering, and there is no long track record or big parent community to read through yet. It's algebra-based and not AP level, so a student aiming at AP Physics 1 will need something heavier. It covers physics only, and $500 up front is a real number even when the crates are reusable across siblings. If your student is bright and bored by textbook science, though, this is the rare high school science option where the hands-on part is the curriculum and not a bolt-on lab kit.