Following the national trend of recession, America’s high school students have to work harder to afford their expenses. As if paying for gas, food, and whatever else wasn’t enough, both Mother’s Day this month and Father’s Day in June are another helping on your financial plate. If only there was a way to do something nice for mom and dad without cutting a hole in your wallet. However, your solution for these worries is here: Instructables.com!
            Created especially for the purpose of using simple items to build almost anything, Instructables.com is a tool waiting to be used. Whatever your need, the website is available to help you make projects for school, gifts and much more. 
            “Because of the recession we’re in, I’ve been taking steps to save as much money as I can,” said junior Kate Baringer, who is new to the site. “I am used to constructing household things for school projects, so I’m definitely open to whatever help the site will give me in the future.” 
            Aside from using her resources to make projects, Baringer is conscious when it comes to using materials at hand to make food. She experiments, substituting the needed ingredients with whatever she has at home, rather than making the trip to the store to buy exactly what the recipe calls for. 
            For those interested in cooking breakfast in bed for mom, Instructables.com offers countless recipes. Anybody can submit their own instructions for meals or any task they deem relevant to others. Once they create a username for the site, they can post steps to help others with projects. The site is free and is helpful to people new to the site. 
            “The first thing I noticed about it was how user friendly it is,” junior Megan Garvin, who is familiar with the site, said. “It has a menu for newly posted instructions to help anybody become comfortable with it. The bright orange layout of the site is also appealing.”
        Set up back in 2005 by graduates from MIT, the site was designed with the purpose of helping people with a passion for building things. The site’s creator, Eric J. Willhelm, Ph.D., created it with the mindset of making something so easy, “even his grandmother can use it.”