Some children use their after-school time to ride their bike. Others play the latest entry in the Halo franchise on their XBox, and still others will sit and devour their latest favorite book.
And then there are the children who use the time to build a tilt-a-whirl.
The mainstay carnival ride is brought down to a manageable size, of course: inches-high LEGO constructions that twirl around little yellow men on the power of a bite-size motor. About half a dozen of the devices were the product of Friday afternoon’s Bricks 4 Kidz project in the Prairie Ridge community.
The national after-school program exposes children from ages 3 to 13 to principles of physics and engineering through LEGO building exercises. Each session has the students build a new complex machine, typically introduced with a brief history lesson on the device’s origin and an age-appropriate physics lesson on what makes it tick.
“Who here knows what a tilt-a-whirl is?” instructor Vicki Kostic asked her group Friday afternoon.
“Oh!” Alex Madrill shot his hand up. “I think those are the things you’re in, and they spin around and around and it presses you against the walls?”
“You’re close,” Kostic said. “But this tilts and whips the rider around in their seats. It was actually invented by a man named Herbert Sellner in 1926, and he started by putting a chair on his kitchen table and having his son sit in it while he rocked the table back and forth.
“Over the next year, he built 14 in his back yard.”
Kostic moved the discussion over to an introduction to chaotic systems: in this case, a ride that takes advantage of small differences in motion to create an unpredictable experience.
These explanatory lessons seemed especially appreciated by the older, middle school aged students in the class.
“We’ve built an airplane, we built a helicopter, we built a drag racer,” 12-year-old student Josh Cummins said, rattling off some of his favorite past projects. “We learned how a helicopter works. The blade spins, that pushes all the air toward the ground and that pushes the helicopter up.”
But it’s the hands-on segment of the afternoon that keeps the kids coming back. On this particular day, a mix up with the keys to the Prairie Ridge Community Center exiled the class outdoors for the first 20 minutes of class, a circumstance that deterred no one. Instead, the kids gathered around an open box of blocks and began building on their own. One small girl built a plane cockpit raised above a flat platform, holding her creation up triumphantly.
“It’s a boat,” she said. “But it also goes in space and flies around!”
She ran off, gliding her space-boat in the air above her: “Pbblt-Pbblt, vroom! Pbblt-Pbblt, vroom!”
Inside after the opening lesson, every child dove hungrily into their block kits and workbooks as soon as they could take them from Kostic. The block play is more than entertaining enough, but each child also vies for their own tiny LEGO man; their reward for completing the lesson successfully.
“This is the one that I made,” Dora Madrill said, holding up a small figure with a red body, white skeleton face and blue hat. “He’s red, white and blue!”
The shortened day proved a meager obstacle for the kids. In no time at all, the room was filled with the sound of a half-dozen whirs as every tilt-a-whirl jolted to life.
The Prairie Ridge Bricks 4 Kidz program is held Fridays from 2:15 to 3:15 p.m. at the Community Center, 14104 Prairie Ridge Dr. E. in Bonney Lake. Register for the free classes, sponsored by Communities in Schools of Orting, by calling 360-893-7185 or by emailing cdaffern@cis-orting.org.
