Gross Motor Control Solution

How It Works

Really, there's no puzzle here; it is more of an activity. The only frame that required any sort of "trick" to solve was the "This is Sparta" frame, which usually required that a third person use their arm and hand where the improbable/impossible food was.

"More bars in more places"
"Charlie's Angels"
"The big X"
"Self-supporting"
"This is sparta"

Solution

When teams successfully completed all frames, they were given the answer CONTORT.

Design Notes

This puzzle had many revisions after beta; most notably, the original frames we thought would be difficult (such as the 'charlies angles' frame) turned out to be far easier than expected.

Construction Notes

Construction on this involved building several wooden frames, taping and sawing around 100 large pieces of cardboard, and several other time-intensive fabrication tasks.

"Fabrication: cutting cardboard"
"Fabrication: stack of completed cardboard"
"Behind the scenes: GMC staging area"
"The most common and hilarious way to fail at This Is Sparta"

GC Notes

As we neared the day of the event, it was determined it would be too difficult to run three concurrent instances of this puzzle, as originally envisioned. Instead, we ran a single pipelined instance (which turned out to be good for other reasons, as it enabled us to reuse frames as barriers! Many thanks to the staffers who innovated with the use of a kazoo to signal pass/fail 😃.