Most people are unaware of how much critical thinking goes into creating a piece of art. Hundreds of questions need to be answered while decisions and revisions constantly need to be made in order to successfully finish a drawing, painting or sculpture. It really helps to develop and sharpen students’ ability to think outside the box in order to find creative solutions to problems. These important skills will serve them well in the future. I like to challenge my students by presenting them with the “problem” and their finished artwork is their “solution”. In this particular project, I challenged each student to build a 3D sculpture using 6 Styrofoam cups, without the use of glue to hold it together. Their only tool was an X-Acto knife. (The other obvious challenge was to finish the project with all 10 fingers still intact…which thankfully they all did!) Using quality slot construction to hold everything together presented a myriad of challenges for them! The wonderful results were varied…each one, just as beautiful and unique as each student is…with no two anything alike!