A history museum isn’t generally considered the sort of place that will deliver a jolt of excitement into young minds.

But the idea of a children’s workshop geared around inventing wacky contraptions got the attention of Justus Lester.

“My mom told me it was about chain reactions,” said Lester, a third grader from Freeland.

“I really like domino chain reactions.”

Lester was one of 10 fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders from Oak Harbor, Coupeville and Freeland who spent their spring break mornings this week attending the Rube Goldberg Workshop at the Island County Historical Society Museum in Coupeville.

The workshop was taught by Sherri Brady and funded by the Safeway Foundation so the kids could attend for free.

The focus was on engineering, science and stretching one’s imagination as wide as it could go.

The workshops are inspired by Goldberg, the late Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist whose works focused on zany inventions that performed a simple operation.

He died in 1970, but his creativy and sense of humor live on through a nonprofit run by his granddaughter dedicated to teaching science, technology, engineering and the arts, sprinkled with fun, in the spirit of Goldberg.

The group of students designed and built their own contraptions, drew cartoons about them, then eventually linked all of their projects together to perform a series of operations. The culmination of their work was on display for the public Friday during a free museum open house.

“I guess we’re not considered a typical children’s museum, but I think we all feel that history is something that is passed down through generations,” said Joy Keating, administrative assistant at the Island County Museum.

“These younger children need to experience the history as well to understand the importance of it and understand why it’s important to preserve and protect our historical resources.”

Keating said the Goldberg workshop, held in the museum’s side exhibit room, was a way to introduce kids to the museum and show them “that it’s not a scary place. It’s a place you can come and learn and really engage and be part of the study of history and how it relates to today.”

This week, the museum was a place for kids to piece together plastic pipes, cardboard tubes, Hot Wheels race track pieces and anything else that was brought in to create wild inventions.

Some kids even gripped glue guns to burn holes into plastic cups. There was a method to the madness.

Or at least, there seemed to be most of the time.

“They’re using mostly recycled materials, found objects, pulleys and dominos and ramps and all kinds of things to create simple machines,” Brady said. “We are inventing and we’re failing forward. We’re trial and error. And some things work, some don’t. We work as a team to try to figure out how to make them better and then all of our machines have to come together. So we connect all these machines to make one giant Rube Goldberg machine — basically, a kinetic energy machine.”

It’s been a couple of years since the museum hosted a children’s event aside from guided tours and Keating couldn’t remember any program in the past that lasted as long as a week.

“For kids, you’ve really got to do those hands-on things because a lot of people think history museums are all no-touch areas,” Keating said. “So if kids can get engaged tactilely, I think they learn and remember a lot better.”

If sponsors and volunteers step forward, the museum will continue to offer these sort of programs, said executive director Rick Castellano.

“We want to start doing some more children’s programming to engage younger audiences,” he said.

The Island County Museum is offering free admission this month.