“Dad, I don’t want to go to trick-or-treating, I want to stay in the WonderLab!”
When I overheard an 11-year-old say these words, I knew we’d made something special with Mayor Clayton’s WonderLab. Brooklee, the incredible kid who said these words, was on her Make-A-Wish trip to Central Florida with her family and staying on the property at Give Kids The World Village, an 89-acre storybook resort where children with critical illnesses and their families spend weeklong, cost-free vacations. Brooklee was visiting from Utah, and her parents explained that she asked to visit the WonderLab every day of their vacation; she couldn’t wait to try all the daily activities. By the end of their vacation, the volunteers and I cheered as soon as she entered the building.
Mayor Clayton’s WonderLab, our six-room STEAM activity center, opened in July 2024 and the response has been incredible, with many stories like Brooklee’s — faces lighting up with excitement and a sense of accomplishment. Parents have shared that their children loved the activities so much, they plan to re-create them at home. Perhaps most impressively, even teenagers have stayed engaged for hours.
Designing the WonderLab
The vision for a makerspace at Give Kids The World came from Ian Cole, their chief innovation officer (and producer of Maker Faire Orlando!). In 2020, he brought my husband, Evan — a brilliant designer — and me, an experiential educator, on board to design the space. Together, the three of us made the key decisions that ultimately brought the WonderLab to life.
Give Kids The World Village already had an impressive list of venues on property like a castle, movie theater, ice cream shop, and rides, to name a few. And every night, families return from Orlando’s theme parks to a themed party at the Village, including a popular Halloween bash on Monday evenings, hence Brooklee’s trick-or-treating comment.
In that larger context, we wanted to design an experience for vacationing tweens/teens in an environment that is both beautifully themed and adaptable, all while adding to the mission of inspiring hope for wish families. To bring all this to life, we were also given a building that would need extensive renovation.
The challenge in designing the WonderLab was to figure out how to design a space that was flexible and attractive, childlike but not childish, and neither overstimulating nor boring. We had to find a balance that felt cool to teens but didn’t distract from the activities.
We created a compelling narrative to act as the foundation for all the decisions to come.
Once we decided on the story, the design elements began to fall into place. Evan gave the lab a look of “childlike sci-fi” filled with a bright color palette and design elements from the Wonderbot world. Additionally, he decided natural wood should be incorporated throughout. This acts as a place for the eye to rest from color; we decided to show the end grain of the wood so kids could see how everything was made. I like to think of it as “practical whimsy.”
Mayor Clayton (the Village’s 6-foot mayor bunny) has met a lot of kids over the years and knows they have a lot of creativity! He realized they need a place to share it at the Village. He called on his friends the Wonderbots (Wonder, Imagination, and Possibility) to help him build his vision of a creative space to explore. They agreed and got right to work on the project converting an old building to a new lab filled with robotic inventions. One such invention is the Brilliance Bottler. This machine collects creative brilliance and converts it to usable power for the lab. So, every time a kid has an idea, they help keep the lights on!
Experiencial Education
While Evan focused on the design (the look and feel), I dedicated myself to the functionality. In my 16 years of teaching, I had little experience with STEAM/STEM; I was a history, art, and literature teacher. In fact, when I was hired to design the WonderLab activities, I was taken aback. How can I create activities around a topic I’m not very experienced with?
The answer: Learn as much as I could from people smarter than me and put my experiential learning background to good use. Experiential education (EE) creates learning experiences that have meaning; the focus is not solely the experience itself, but the reflection on the experience that provides the deepest learning. There are gigantic books on the subject, but I’m going to narrow it down to the three main EE points we utilize in the lab: curiosity, inclusion, and process.
- Curiosity rules in the WonderLab. Our facilitators are trained to express genuine curiosity with participants. This can happen in many ways, including asking questions to arrive at an outcome, being open to outcomes other than the intended ones, and promoting “redos” to try things multiple times. This creative intentionality creates a collaborative environment between the learners and facilitators, an exchange of information instead of the traditional one-way transfer of information.
- Inclusion is important in any creative space, but especially at the Village where we serve children from around the world with many different needs. All guests are greeted when they arrive at the lab with an original animatronics show and invitation to explore the space. Every day has a variety of activities, and every room has a facilitator welcoming guests. We have worked to eliminate barriers like accessibility and apprehension. Feeling included gives the kids confidence to try ideas and the WonderLab is an environment for all because everyone belongs.
- At the WonderLab we strive to enjoy the process over the product. If a child falls in love with a process, they will want to explore all the possibilities within it. We enable experience, so the process is enjoyable and easy to build upon in subsequent creations. This allows space for kids and facilitators to collaborate, ask questions, and be curious. It’s a bonus that the products are fantastic too!
I’ve mentioned our facilitators quite a lot. Every one of our incredible facilitators are volunteers and they are the heart of operations at the WonderLab, and the Village overall. Give Kids The World Village needs between 1,500 and 1,800 volunteer shifts filled each week to operate at full capacity; these include roles such as serving ice cream, operating rides, or serving food. When we were planning for the new WonderLab volunteers, it was clear the roles were going to be unique. We needed folks who could comfortably engage with kids in learning experiences, often with multiple kids at once. Even more, we needed to be able to train any of the volunteers to teach any of the activities while finding their groove in experiential facilitation. I am thrilled our training techniques have proved successful with these challenges and the community growing in the WonderLab is an inclusive and experiential one. In fact, we create the same environment for facilitators as the one they create for the guests.
Even the Teens
A few weeks ago, a family of three teenagers walked through the WonderLab doors. One of them had dark hair covering their face, walking behind the rest of the family, and was clearly not sure about the bright, colorful space they had just entered. I observed as they took notice of the animatronic welcoming them into the lab, and I figured it was a good sign. As they walked through the rooms, deciding where to land, I noticed a glimmer of interest in our circuitry activity. I watched as the facilitator in the room welcomed them in and showed an example of how easy it was to make a noise or light machine. Quietly, they took some pieces and parts to work on at a station. When I returned 15 minutes later, they had built an entire keyboard circuit and were playing music for the volunteer! It was incredible to see the smile appear behind the hair.
Activate and Captivate
Choosing captivating activities for the WonderLab was crucial. Our families are on vacation, so it was essential to create a fun and exciting space that truly felt worth their time. Through prototyping early activities, naturally WonderLab standards emerged. These standards would act as filters for every activity to pass through to be a WonderLab activity. Here are those standards:
1. Activities must be hands-on. An active work environment encourages participants to engage, chat, work together, and laugh.
2. Screen-based activities must have a physical component/payoff. One example is our animatronics activity. Kids use computers for this, but the excitement comes from watching the motors move the animatronic body parts, not the screens. The screens are merely a tool.
3. Each activity must encompass at least two STEAM pillars. I wanted kids to see how the STEAM elements (science, tech, engineering, arts, math) easily interact and are used together.
4. Activities must be adaptable for various ages, abilities, and interests. Everyone should get a chance to learn, imagine, and wonder. We work tirelessly in the WonderLab to give all kids a memorable experience.
5. Activities must have a mix of learning and exploring/experimenting. It’s important for kids to know they can go further with any activity, whether it’s staying in the WonderLab for 2 hours to complete a goal or taking information home to re-create the activity there. No activity has a hard start or end to it.
6. Low stakes, nothing intimidating. We want to inspire curiosity. Activity introductions should be simple, engaging, and easy to start. If kids can’t find success in a few minutes, they may not continue. I wanted kids to benefit quickly, within 10–15 minutes, with the potential to experiment for hours.
7. Activities must be volunteer-run. Give Kids The World Village runs on volunteer help, so volunteers need to be trained frequently. If the activities are complex, it would scare volunteers away and be too complicated for most kids to engage.
8. Create choice. Kids and adults like to have choices, so we put choice into the activities: colors, storylines, circuitry challenges, paper airplane designs, etc. Also, there’s an assortment of activities, four or five each day.
9. Theming creates cohesion. Giving activities solid theming and/or design creates a strong brand, but they’re also more effective when everything is cohesive and organized.
Accessibility and flexibility were important concerns for the space. We knew there would be a large population of wheelchairs in the space, so we thought carefully about counter height, table height, and mobility. Furniture layouts would change with each activity’s needs. For this, we created rolling workstations that nested into countertops so we could double the work space when busy or put tables away for needed floorspace. Our fabrication company worked with us to determine the right materials to be sanitized and hold up over time.
Also, the building we were renovating had all of one closet for storage — which would not work for an activity center. Evan and I built as much storage as possible into the plans so materials could be put away out of sight to reduce visual noise and overstimulation. As we walk through the lab today, we often say it feels like we are walking through our 3D renders!
Welcome to the WonderLab
Let’s take a tour of the WonderLab spaces.
Exterior: As families walk up to the WonderLab, they see robotic inventions, tubes, pipes, and a giant meter covering the building. At the entryway, they pass by our three robot mascots known as the Wonderbots (our WonderLab builders) and under a banner welcoming all makers, inventors, and creators!
Lab Access: The first room that guests enter greets them with beautiful backlit posters illustrating the WonderLab story, spacey Lego creations floating in a star field overhead, and an animatronic of Mayor Clayton. This space welcomes families and primes them with curiosity while transitioning between the outside world and the WonderLab creation spaces.
The Hub: The Hub is directly in the center of the building and connects all rooms. As a natural space for wayfinding, room names and daily activities are labeled here. Additionally, our “WonderLab TV” plays a compilation of process videos including watercolor painting, claymation, stop motion, and digital art. But the main feature here is the Brilliance Bottler, a Wonderbot-created machine that converts wonder, imagination, and possibility into power for the building. Your awesome ideas keep our lab up and running!
Test & Try Lab: This room is for facilitation activities that allow for iteration such as printmaking, robot obstacle courses, paper airplane research, and circuitry machine building. This room also features two Garner Holt Education Through Imagination animatronics that kids get to puppet and record animatronic shows.
Tech 101: Tech 101 is a facilitation room that emphasizes the mix of art and tech. The activities here include 3D printing, stop-motion and green-screen video making, weaving on 3D-printed looms, and button making. We showcase five of our 3D printers here and all kinds of awesome prints to inspire guests.
Volts & Bolts Studio: Since we are down the street from world-class theme parks, including animatronics in the WonderLab mix was a no-brainer! This hands-on exhibit shows guests how raw materials are turned into parts for animatronic tiki birds, and how those animatronics are programmed. To illustrate it all, we have a laser cutter, vacuum former, mini CNC machine, and more 3D printers. This experience was made possible by the generosity of Garner Holt Productions and Garner Holt Education Through Imagination.
Even while I was writing this article in my WonderLab office, I heard a parent say, “This place is cool; look at all the details!” How awesome is that? Beyond the look, story, and activities of the WonderLab, the root of everything we do at Give Kids The World Village is to provide hope to children with critical illnesses. We believe happiness inspires hope, and this is true in the WonderLab.
We want the enthusiasm of the WonderLab to go home with them. For many Wish families, consistent school time or clubs can be difficult. Kids may miss science fairs, robotics clubs, or art classes. The WonderLab works to fill those gaps so kids can think about making cool stuff in the future. We provide families with resources to create our activities at home, gift to them 3D-printed tools, and share a vlog series that shows how the WonderLab was built.
When we started, it was almost unimaginable to me that a child would not only leave a theme park early, but also willingly pass up a chance to collect loads of free Halloween candy — all to create stop-motion videos in the WonderLab. It’s incredibly fulfilling to see our design work be realized in a wonderful space that welcomes kids every day.
Keep up with the WonderLab on their vlog.
This article appeared in Make: Volume 92.
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