Families engage in science night

Grand Prairie Main Library hosted their monthly Family Science Night event on Saturday, Feb. 28. The theme for the event was engineering tower.

Families were invited to attempt to build the strongest and tallest towers using clothes pins, popsicle sticks, paper clips and note cards.  

“The library likes to educate families and bring them together,” Kristi Olabode, adult and family programmer for the Grand Prairie Library System, said. “This is our Family Science Night. We do one every month to promote science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

“We know STEM is important overall in education for school. This event incorporates all parts of STEM that families are able to work on together and use their brains to make the science connecting moments. These type of events are important because families are able to do activities they may not be able to do at home, but they can come somewhere, engage with other people, and learn new things.”

Adults and children of all ages helped one another as they created unique ways to build their towers. During the event an aunt and her niece were laughing together while building a diamond shaped tower.

“We are excited about the challenge and building the tower,” Maria, aunt of Andrea, said. “I’m so glad I’m spending time with my niece.”

“We’re just here to have fun with our family,” Andrea said. “We get to have the experience and see what amazing things we can do.”

The Family Science Night events are always held on the first Wednesday of each month.

“It’s really fun to see how everybody’s brain works differently,” Chris Dohl, a library service tech, said. “The way they design something is going to be different from every other team designs their tower. There’s not necessarily a right or wrong way to do it. It’s really interesting to see how people come up with different ideas on how to build things.  

“Over the years, Kristi and the programmers found ideas to get more programs going and get more people involved in them,” Dohl said. “The programmers do a lot of research and they try to find really fun ideas online and recreate them for the families at the library. It’s not always about coming up with original ideas. There’s stuff out there and there’s no sense to reinvent the wheel.”