I bet you could figure out how to make it easy. Is it the kind of thing where you could hot-glue the sticks together in advance and just let them wrap the yarn around?
@margonaut So I had three 2nd grade girls in the library who were fasting for Ramadan and I asked them if they each wanted to make one to help me decide if their class could do it. (I glued the sticks ahead of time — and these were three “crafty-type” girls.) After 30 minutes of nonstop “Can you tie this? Can you cut this? Can you untwist this? I have a knot! Can you help me? I forgot what to do! I’m stuck!” We decided that I could not do this with a class of 23 students. They, however, were thrilled.