By Ethan Lee
Hometown Weekly Intern
On Sunday, July 9, the Needham Library hosted a Tween Tech Take Apart event in the Community Room.
Children of all ages were invited to take apart different pieces of technology, including a Keurig coffee machine, a clock, a computer keyboard, calculator, and more. Participants were encouraged to use the destructed parts to create jewelry, picture frames, and other crafts.
Needham Library Teen Librarian Erin Bassett, the coordinator of the event, explained her motivation behind organizing the event. “The theme for our summer reading program this year is called ‘Build a Better World’ … in the process of deconstructing, we’re actually building things.”
Indeed, participants enthusiastically immersed themselves in the process of constructing new items from different hardware. Parents of the children involved were equally excited about the event for various reasons.
Eddie Taub, the father of two participants at the event, looked forward to his children achieving “a better appreciation of how things work.”
Meanwhile, Sam Singer, the mother of a participant at the event, was glad that her child could realize “that there’s a lot of activities that are fun to do in the world that don’t involve sitting in front of a computer game.”
Furthermore, Bassett explained her goal for the program: “For this particular event, [I hope participants understand] how things go together … when you open a keyboard, for example, you find things that you didn’t know were there before, so it’s not just keys. There’s a bunch of motherboards and a whole bunch of different things in computers, and it’s very exciting. They’re learning new from old.”
Based on the excitement that the participants showed, it is clear that the Tween Tech Take Apart program taught children all about the different parts within technology as well as the numerous other objects that can be constructed from them.
