Sandbox card templates

Every great idea starts somewhere. But not every great idea needs to start with you spending 10 minutes arranging boxes and lines.

Sandbox card templates let you skip the setup. Pick from 60 ready-made templates that turn an empty card into something instantly useful.

And because creating is more fun without limits, you can now make unlimited sandboxes until the end of 2025.

60 ways to start faster

Templates come in five categories: organizers, slides, activities, analysis, and reflection.

From Venn diagrams and timelines to lab reports and KWL charts, each template pairs the right background with the right objects. Instead of arranging boxes and drawing lines, you can jump straight into teaching, collaborating, or creating.

A teacher can kick off a reading lesson with a KWL chart in seconds. A student can open a lab report and focus on the experiment instead of formatting. A team can spin up a SWOT analysis mid-meeting and keep moving.

Why it matters

Sandbox has always wrestled with two challenges. Most people don’t realize how much you can build with it. And even if they do, setting everything up takes effort. Templates solve both problems. They act as a catalog of possibilities and a shortcut to get there.

From idea to card in one click

Create a new sandbox, and you’ll see suggestions immediately. Or add a new card to an existing sandbox and click Start from a template... to browse the full catalog. Choose any template, and your card instantly adopts its background and objects.

Card templates are available to educational users, including Padlet for Schools accounts. Only the creator and editors of a sandbox can add a template, not those with reading or writing permissions. You can find them on mobile and web.

In your language

Most templates include text, like prompts, instructions, or labels. All of that content is localized, so you’ll see templates in the same language as the rest of your Padlet account.

Under the hood, we actually keep a separate sandbox for each supported language. When templates change, we sync and update those sandboxes so the translated layouts stay aligned, even if the text runs longer or shorter than the English version. That way, the templates feel native, not copy-pasted.

Handling previews and attachments

When you browse the list of templates, we show a preview of what each looks like on the canvas.

To show these previews, we had two options. One was to render the actual template live, so you could click and interact with it before applying it. However, that would have caused additional computation in the browser, especially when you just wanted to quickly preview different templates—we would have to keep running code to render them.

Instead, we went with a screenshot system. Because each template is static, we captured it as an image and cached it, so previews load instantly without messing with the live sandbox. It’s faster, safer, and a case where simplicity won out over complexity.

Handling attachments was also tricky.

Some templates include images or other files, and those originally “belonged” to our system account that created them. If we just copied them over, they wouldn’t load for anyone else.

To fix this, we built template assets, a special type of file stored in a public file bucket just for templates. That way, attachments aren’t tied to any one account, and applying a template always works instantly.

What’s next

Templates make it easier to start. Unlimited sandboxes through the end of the year make it easier to keep going. Get started by going to sandbox.new.

Next we’re building out more gallery templates to speed creation time even more. Got ideas for new card or gallery templates? Let us know.