YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – The opening of the second floor exhibition space at Oh Wow! The Roger & Gloria Jones Children’s Center for Science & Technology is getting off to an amazing start.
The first installation in the new space will be a maze that will take up about half of the floor. The hands-on – and feet-on – attraction for children and adults is made entirely of cardboard boxes.
On Tuesday, Chris Minsal of California-based A-Maze-D and a dozen or so volunteers spent a few hours assembling the boxes, taping them together to make new shapes, and finally assembling them into a maze.
The volunteers were from the Youngstown office of Factset, a global financial analytics consultant.
After it’s assembled, the maze will be painted to look like a circuit board, Minsal said. It will open to the public along with the rest of the second floor April 16 and remain up until the end of the year.
Minsal is an artist and the director of A-Maze-D, which was founded by maze maker Dave Phillips. His company has put mazes in several children’s museums nationwide, custom designing each to fit the available space.
The choice of cardboard boxes makes each maze flexible, inexpensive and easy to assemble and take down. But that’s not all.
“It was inspired by kids’ fascination toward cardboard,” Minsal said. “Instead of building it with plywood or regular building materials, why not use cardboard?”
The walls are 5 feet tall, and the pathways are 4 feet wide. “As you make your way through it, there are up to 13 challenges – mazes inside the maze,” Minsal said.
About 250 boxes were used in the maze, each roughly 3 feet by 2 feet.
That’s small by A-Maze-D standards, whose mazes usually require at least 500 boxes, according to Minsal.
In addition to the maze, the second floor will also have a snack bar, a tech hub and an America Makes 3D printing lab. The latter two attractions will be used mainly for educational programming and not as open exhibits, according to Katie DeToro, executive director of Oh Wow!
“It’s really exciting to open a whole new floor,” DeToro said as she watched the maze take shape.
Oh Wow! purchased its building in 2019 and has been working toward expanding into the second floor.
The cost of a temporary exhibit for a science and technology center such as Oh Wow! ranges from $20,000 to $80,000, DeToro said, adding the maze is on the lower end. “We had some generous sponsorship support from some of our longtime supporters,” she said.
Oh Wow! connected with A-Maze-D last year at a national conference of science and technology centers. The company produces maze and labyrinth attractions for museums, zoos, aquariums, parks, schools, farm parks, special events and other venues.
Minsal joined A-Maze-D seven years ago. He described how he met Phillips, the company’s visionary founder.
“[Phillips] has been designing mazes for over 50 years,” he said. “He came to my town, and I asked him if he could put up a maze at my kids’ school. He did, and it was a hit.”
Minsal has long been involved with his children’s parent-teacher organization. He uses the knowledge he’s gained from working with kids in creating art and other elements of the mazes.
“If you lose contact with the youth, your shows won’t reflect what they want,” he said.
Pictured at top: Katie DeToro, executive director of Oh Wow!, and Chris Minsal of A-Maze-D pose on the second floor of the Youngstown children’s science center Tuesday, where a maze made of cardboard boxes was assembled.