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Date: 2/9/2022
BLANDFORD – Teaching artist Jay Mankita with Playful Engineers was at the Porter Memorial library on Feb. 2 helping young patrons to make chain reaction contraptions with boxes of toys, dominos, race track pieces, sticks, ping-pong balls and other bits that he provides for the two-hour workshop.
Mankita said the contraptions the children of all ages build with the parts he brings are in effect an introduction to “the basic physics of how forces and objects work together.”
Asked how he got involved in the traveling maker space, Mankita said it happened about 10 years ago when his son was four and someone showed them a video of a Rube Goldberg machine, which he explained is an overly complicated machine made up of chain reactions designed to accomplish a simple task.
“He and I went into the playroom and I never came out,” said Mankita, a singer-songwriter and performing artist, adding that he has been doing workshops ever since on building chain reaction machines both virtually and in libraries and schools, in Westfield and surrounding towns.
“I build things that move and I hack toys,” Mankita said. “I like to find new uses for ordinary objects.”
Some videos of techniques he’s learned to make machines work may be found at www.playfulengineers.com. He admitted that most of his coolest ideas come from kids in the workshops.
In Blandford, Callum Thomas, 9, and Finley Thomas, “almost 7,” were building separate machines on tables next to each other.
The Callum Thomas’ machine was multi-layered and complicated. “My goal is to get the ball off of the table in a really unnecessary way,” Callum said.
Finley Thomas was trying hard to get a ball around the table using tracks and dominos, but kept running into a problem in one corner. He was undeterred, however, continuing to tweak the dominos to turn the corner, while getting tips from Mankita.
Edwin Roberts, 7, and Hawthorne Roberts, 3½, were working with Brianna Sloane on a truck track that began with a reaction made with Tinker Toys and string.
Teens Oliver Oparowsky, Jeffrey Antonellis and Ana Maria Holmes were making slower progress but in deep deliberation when Jeffrey’s mother, librarian Nicole Daviau, checked on them.
Also having fun building was Library Technician Ashley Neveu.
The Playful Engineers hands-on STEAM workshop was supported in part by a grant from the Blandford Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.