Spreading Ideas

This past week, one of our young patrons came into the ideaLAB to show me something. She had a stop motion animation video on her iPad. Her video was fairly long, had sound, and a story. She did a great job! Last month, I showed her the Stop Motion app in passing, because I think that it's pretty neat. It fired her imagination and now she's a 9 year old movie maker!

Experiences like that are what the ideaLAB is all about. We love 3D printing things for people and showing them how to make and use things. Our real goal, though, is for people to take the seeds of those ideas: paper circuitry, 3D printing, robot making, etc and see where there own imaginations can take them.

We Love Mad Science!

If you happened to be passing through the Children's Department on Tuesdays this past summer at around 2pm, you would have heard children chanting “We love mad science!” For eight weeks, Miss Melissa, Mr. Joe, and Miss Merissa portrayed science geniuses as school-age children were invited to attend Elementary Explorations, a science-based program including experiments, trivia games, crafts, and other hands-on fun. Each week we kicked off the program with our theme song, followed by delving into topics such as dinosaurs, the human body, inventors and inventions, the ocean, and, even, a session called Science Spectacular, which covered a plethora of topics like volcanoes and flight. Each week there were anywhere from 40-100 children having fun and learning in the process. We look forward to exploring new topics next year and hope to see you there!