At the museum I observed the “Vroom” piece in the Garage room. This was the mini skateboard-ramp like space located on the right side of the room. The piece was built so that kids could walk into the ramp “test course” and build small rolling contraptions (mainly resembling cars) out of magnetic blocks and roller blade wheels and roll, push, and occasionally fling them across the space. The space itself was big enough that the kids had plenty of room to move, stand, sit, and lie down in while they assembled the wheel and block parts. The magnetic wheels and clocks were on the wall (magnets) which allowed a clear view of the pieces, and kept the floor space open and (mostly) uncluttered, so there was freedom to move around.

The amount of time and the way that kids interacted with this piece varied greatly. It was fairly common for one to walk up the ramp into the space, and then proceed to walk wight out again. On the other end of the spectrum some kids spent over 10 minutes building structures that they then pushed and played with in the space, or in one case made a structure entirely out of wheels pointing in every direction, and appeared to be more entertained by the fact that it didn’t roll anywhere. One commonly heard phrase between kids interacting (siblings) and kids and their parents fit along the lines of “(mom) look what I made!” It appeared that the building process itself was an important element, as was getting to share with those around them that they build something on their own, that they could then play with. Whether by nature of the structure of the assembled magnetic pieces, or that the mini skateboard rink did not really seem to support the flinging of the self assembled cars, most of the time kids spent was on building, while less was spent on actually playing with the structure they built.

One thing that i found interesting while observing this space, was seeing that the tilted train tracks close by (kids could assembled wooden train tracks on a slope and push trains down them) had a much higher retention rate when it came to the amount of kids that stayed after first approaching it, and maintained their interest for longer in the “play” phase as opposed to the “build phase.” I think that this may partially have been due to the accessibility of the train tracks, as an object that most kids understand off the bat how to interact with, whereas the relationship between the wheels and blocks on the wall and the space that they had walked into with “Vroom” may not have been as clear, especially to the younger kids. In addition to this, in “vroom” the cars/wheels/blocks systems did not move in a predictable, or very interesting way, usually almost bumping off the sides without much control. I think that this may also have contributed to why kids spent less time playing with the structures, and usually left shortly after.