Round-rimmed glasses framing his wide eyes, Professor Yot pokes his head through the large window at the front of the Toy Lab in Anderson Township.

"What's going on out here?" he cries in a thick Russian accent. His audience, a group of kids ages 6 to 12, erupts in giggles.

He leads the group back to his laboratory, where this nutty professor works not with chemicals, but with disassembled toys. Stainless steel bins around the laboratory are filled with plastic and metal arms, legs, heads and other discarded toy parts, the scene an imaginary science experiment gone horribly wrong.

"We wanted to have a space that doesn't look like anything they've seen before," says Professor Yot's alter ego, Sean Mullaney. "There are a lot of surprises."

After a few words of direction from their host (and a surprise appearance from Professor Yot's sidekick, Mr. Nuf), the kids and their parents will spend the next hour in a world limited only by their imaginations. Each family gets to choose seven individual parts, one from each bin, and bring them to the curved counter in the center of the room. There, they piece together a new creation for a lab-coated assembly specialist to fuse into a finished product.

The process is the end result of an idea Mullaney had more than a year ago. The owner of 17 toy patents, Mullaney wanted to give a holiday presentation showing kids how their toys become reality.

"My nieces and nephews would come to town, and we would go over to my toy shop," Mullaney says. "I always had different parts lying around, and they would start putting stuff together. They absolutely loved it. So I thought, 'What if we could do this in sort of a classroom setting?'"

He approached Tommy Rueff, the director of Happen, Inc., a non-profit family arts group in Anderson. Within weeks, the two had put together "Extreme Toys," a once-in-awhile workshop at the Happen, Inc. offices that quickly began selling out a month before each session. Soon, after a 1,700-square-foot studio next door to Happen, Inc. became available, Mullaney and Rueff decided to make the venture into its own business.

The materials come from old toys donated through the lab's Toy Rescue program. The profits are reinvested in Happen, Inc. programming.

"Toys are something that parents, kids and the young-at-heart all enjoy," says Rueff, who sometimes disguises himself as Mr. Nuf. "The first time we did it, we got an unbelievably great response, and it took off from there. It became a no-brainer."

The attraction, Mullaney says, is based on children's deep-seated desires to express themselves creatively no matter what activities they take part in.

"We've never had a child get stuck on what to make," he says. "They're totally wired just to make this thing and make it the way they want. If they're there with a parent, maybe the parent wants the toy a certain way, and you can see the kids get very definite. They already have a vision for it."

"As soon as parents realize their kids are having a great time, they're having a great time, too," Rueff adds. "It gives them a chance to look back on their own childhood, and it also gives them a chance to explain to their kids the kind of toys they played with. It's a nice sharing process."