Makers Day is New Jersey’s annual celebration of STEM culture and the process of creating and learning throughout life.
Its 11th year was celebrated from March 21 to 23 at the Cherry Hill library, among other locations. The first Makers Day was held in 2014 after a grant from LibraryLinkNJ, with the goal of boosting community engagement with libraries, museums and other entities that foster exploration and ingenuity.
The township library celebrated this year’s event with a series of activities for patrons of all ages throughout the building. The day started with a drop-in coloring station for adults in the Reading Room, where magnet crafts that could be completed at home were also offered.
At 10:30 a.m., the library had volunteers on hand to guide participants through various origami projects and shapes, ranging from beginner to advanced. The station was informal, didn’t require registration and provided paper and all other supplies. For children in third through sixth grade, a two-hour event inspired curiosity and taught types of hands-on creation.
Erica Moon is the youth services supervisor for the library.
“It really started with more robotics types of things,” she recalled. “And then we, in Cherry Hill, wanted to kind of get away from all the little plastic bits, so we started calling it more of a how-to festival. So now we’re just learning about the science behind some simple things.”
The first hour of the library event was dedicated to the theme, “Persistence of Vision.” Children and parents were instructed by Moon and the volunteers on how to create kineographs, also known as flip books. The children then created stories by drawing pictures with colored pencils on index cards, and each consecutive card varied slightly from the image before it.
When finished, all the cards were attached with binder clips, with the children holding them at the clipped side and using their thumbs to quickly flip between them, creating the illusion of movement and making the images come to life.
“It’s the simple process of anime animation and just making still frames into a running animated film, basically …” Moon said. “We make the image the same on every card and just move it a little bit,”
Flip book stories started with simple cartwheels and bouncing balls, but quickly shifted to more complex tales as the children got more comfortable with the process.
Susan Turner brought her daughter and son to the library.
“I brought my kids to make flip books …” she explained. “They really enjoyed it. I like seeing his (her son’s) creativity. He had an idea in his head, and kind of seeing it come to life as he’s drawing it, and as he draws, he started adding more elements, like the one with the boat.
“He did the boat moving,” she added, “but then he’s like, ‘I want to add a tsunami.’ So he starts drawing a tsunami coming in and she (her daughter) is just having a great time making a whole bunch of different stories.”
One of the children present, Chloe Turner, created several different books.
“It’s fun,” she noted. ” … So this one is a flower and a ball, and the petals fall down. And this one is an alien, yeah, going out of this day ship, and then going back in. And then this is a balloon, and a boy and the balloon just flows away, and then it pops.”
As the first hour ended, Moon began instructing the children on how to create varied models of paper airplanes, including the dart, the bull nose and the hunter. Flyers with instructions on how to fold paper into each different type of airplane were passed around, with volunteers offering help when needed.
Once all the kids created a plane model, Moon led them in a race to see which creation best flew, introducing them to the concepts of thrust, drag and lift. After everyone had raced at least one of their planes, she revealed a surprise model that had not been mentioned or shown to the group: the Nakamura Lock, a model she felt flew better than any other.
