Slide Rider Staircase slide

On the long, boring summer days of childhood, creativity tends to run wild. That creativity, however, doesn’t always manifest itself in the safest ways. For example, we can remember riding down the stairs in sleeping bags, laundry baskets, cardboard baskets, and trash bags. As fun as that was, it was exceptionally dangerous and often ended in pain.

Kit turns a staircase into a slide

Inventor Trisha Cleveland could save current and future generations of kids from bodily harm with her invention, the SlideRider. It’s more or less one very long plastic-covered foam mat that stretches over your stairs to turn them into an indoor slide. It features safety bumpers on the sides to ensure your little ones don’t go sliding off of the side and into the stair railings and a soft landing pad at the bottom.

Easy to unfold

When you and your kids are done playing with the slide, it folds up very neatly into a handy little package held together with a storage strap. The folded package even has handles on either side to help you move the SlideRider around and put it away.

Compact package

Cleveland is developing the product with Quirky, the public think-tank that makes regular people’s inventions into real products. So far the development process seems to be moving along, but there is one unanswered question: how will kids get back up the stairs once they slide to the bottom?


bottom of the slide

Logistics aside, it’s easy to see there’s a demand for a fun and safe product like this. Quirky is reportedly looking for a manufacturer who can transform this concept into a real product for sale, and they’re soliciting opinions from the public about how much it should cost. Pretty cool, huh?

Are you an ordinary person with a cool idea for an invention, but just not sure how to actually bring it into existence? That’s exactly what Quirky is for, so give their website a look.