Janiae Terrazas stands on the dance platform, arrows laid out in a cross at her feet. She places a metal ring on her finger, connecting her to a custom-made electronic circuit.
Colored arrows rise up the screen in front of the 10-year old. When she presses her foot on the dance pad at just the right moment, she completes the circuit and scores a point in a rhythm game modeled after the popular “Dance Dance Revolution” series.
Terrazas took numerous turns playing the game with the other children who came to the MakerSpace, March 4, at the El Rito Public Library. They learned how circuits work, and that their own bodies and many other everyday objects, like fruit, can conduct electricity.
The game was one of three experiments that are now publicly available for visitors to the library, 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. every Saturday. People will also be able to experiment with a Lego Mindstorms programmable robot and a 3D printer.
As a student at La Tierra Montessori Charter School of the Arts and Sciences in Española, Terrazas’s favorite subject is science because she likes to see the way different materials react. She looks forward to learning more about science, but has different plans once she graduates.
“I’m probably going to be a lawyer,” she said. “I just like how lawyers investigate stuff.”
Her natural curiosity will keep her coming to the MakerSpace. She wants to learn more about the 3D printer, which can create three-dimensional plastic objects using a computer program.
She got to see a Batman logo and a name tag that were created with the printer, but it malfunctioned when the children and mentor, Steve Cox, tried to print out a new design.
Cox, an engineering professor at Northern New Mexico College, is the architect of the Northern New Mexico STEM Mentor Collective, an organization that started a similar space in January at the Embudo Valley Library in Dixon. He is also emeritus professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University in Houston.
“We want to raise STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) aspirations and expectations, and that’s done by working with families, exporting teachers and getting kids exposed to science,” Cox said.
Jackson Wolf also visited the library for the opening day of MakerSpace and said he may come back for more.
He goes to a montessori school in Santa Fe and said his favorite subject is mathematics.
“We’re learning division now, it is fun, but hard,” Wolf said. “I like science because I like to see how, when you guess something, it’s not always right.”
If he had a 3D printer of his own, he said he would print out a Lego set.
“I think in the 90s, (the 3D printer) would have been amazing,” Wolf, who is 5-years-old, said.
Cox is looking for an undergraduate student to spend two paid hours a weekend mentoring students at the El Rito MakerSpace. In the meantime, there are a few parent volunteers who are learning how to troubleshoot the technology.
“Our schools have excellent teachers, but they’re under-financed,” Cox said. “So, if they do have science labs, like in Pojoaque, for example, I’m working with a seventh-grade teacher with 30 kids in her life science class. No way can they get out the microscopes, it’s just kind of chaos.”
The new space is the latest part of the library’s science-focused Curiosity Kids programming on Saturday mornings, which started last fall, and helps visitors learn about the local ecosystem, natural history and geology.
“The students are grounded in the natural world, and now with this space, they’re learning now some technical stuff,” Library Director Lynett Gillette said. “Through our pre-literacy program, they get a wide variety of the sciences that they’re exposed to and we can see some changes in the kids that, through time, they’re really prepared for school.”