Hands-on learning opportunities engineer fun at Concord Library

CONCORD, CA (Jan. 8, 2024) — An estimated hundred parents and their children packed the Concord Library meeting room January 6 for more than two hours for the Discovery Museum’s Try It Truck, and smiles and laughter emanating from the space signaled the fun being had by all.

“This is a lot of fun. Kids come and learn,” said Sam Bilodeau, of Concord, who brought his family to the event. “There’s no right or wrong way; (the kids) get to learn by doing.”

Before the doors opened at 11:30 a.m. for the event, library officials said upwards to 75 attendees were already lined up across the library’s central space. For older children, one table provided various types of paper, straws, and scissors to make contraptions to see if they would fly to the top of wind chambers, while another table gave opportunities to make mazes to run small vehicles.

For younger children, there were racetracks with peaks and valleys to run Hot Wheels. Large blue foam blocks were even piled up in one corner for the little ones to try their hand at creating as part of the engineering lab-on-wheels event.

David Scholz

David Scholz is back in journalism as a freelance writer and photographer after nearly two decades in education. Prior to moving into teaching in 2000, he worked as a full-time journalist since 1988 for rural community and small daily newspapers in Central Ohio and Northern Nevada, and later in California with The Business Journal in Fresno and dailies in the Bay Area, including The Oakland Tribune and The San Francisco Chronicle. More recently Scholz also worked in an editing, writing, and page layout role with the Rossmoor News.