When I Brought Slot Cars to the Preschool

I was probably 8 years old when I awoke on Christmas morning to discover that Santa had left my brother and me a slot car set.

We hadn't asked for slot cars. I suspect that this was something that Dad really wanted to give to us. I mean, it was the height of the slot car trend in America and this was exactly the kind of toy with which an engineer would want to play. We played with it alongside Dad for a good part of that morning. Since we were then allowed to keep it in the dining room for several days after that, we returned to it repeatedly during the next week.

We learned how to slot our cars onto the tracks. Dad showed us how to properly bend the copper braids (he called them brushes) that created contact with the metal track, making the cars go. There was a red car and a white car. We thought one was a little faster than the other, but our testing was inconclusive. By the end of the week, the track was packed away and put in our bedroom closet where it mostly sat untouched.

As often happens with manufactured toys, even cool ones like a slot car set, the play value wore off quickly. After all, how many times can you drive your car round and round doing nothing but squeezing a little trigger? We had better, more active things to be doing.

A couple years later, our family moved to Athens, Greece for Dad's work. We were only going to be there for two years (as it turned out it was four years), so we didn't take much of our stuff and the slot car track was left behind. Shortly after we arrived, however, Dad came home from work with another slot car set. But this one was far, far better. It was second-hand for one thing and included not only several cars, but a whole case full of car parts, including motors, tires, chassis, car bodies, wires, screws, braids, and everything kids might need to modify and build their own custom cars. There were no instructions, although there were several small screwdrivers and a couple of operational cars that provided us with the "blueprint" for how the parts went together. It wasn't just a slot car set, but rather a race car themed tinkering set.

I played with it far more than I'd played with that original set, not necessarily for racing, but for building and rebuilding functioning slot cars. I would spend hours noodling over how to combine a particular motor with a certain chassis, wheels, and body. I might run it around the track a few times, then it was on to the next. The scripts had been stripped from the toy, rendering it more open-ended, and capable to evoking the emotion that I call, "I wonder . . ."

We passed that set along to other kids when we moved back to the States, but it all came back to me one day several years ago when I came across a slot car set in a big-box toy store. At only $9.99 it seemed like a deal, so I picked one up to bring into the preschool. I knew that the kids were probably too young to build their own cars, but it seemed like exactly the kind of toy that would engage preschoolers for a day or two, maybe a week. 

Not only did it have zoom-zoom appeal, but I knew from experience that playing with slot cars demanded just the right level of fiddling around to keep them interesting: you had to position them correctly into the track slots; the braids, of course, needed constant adjusting; if you went too fast, the cars wouldn't make it around the track; there were several electrical connection points that would need managing; the track itself was a challenge to assemble and re-arrange. The idea of racing cars would draw them in, but I figured the fiddling around would keep them coming back.

For the next decade, that slot car track made two, maybe three, annual appearances in our classroom, each lasting a week before it was once more packed away. That's about as long as most manufactured toys can hold a child's interest. Over years of use, the set became increasingly fiddly to the point that it was almost inoperable. That's the destiny of cheap toys. I kept it going as best I could, but eventually the track would no longer reliably complete the electrical circuit needed to get the cars going -- too many bent parts. Finally, instead of packing or throwing it away, I just let it ride. 

It was fully dismantled over the course of weeks. Over the course of months, the parts mostly migrated to the junkyard playground. And that's where this manufactured toy became everything but a slot car set. It was set free to be loose parts -- wheels, pieces of track, chassis, motors, bodies, hand controllers, guard rails, wires, screws, memories -- that could now become anything at all. Those the children played with for years.

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