Starting a new format for Tinkering

Yesterday, we began a new format for running our Tinkering Tuesday sessions.

It's drop-in, it's open to 6th grade and up.

We have three activities with three librarians running them and people can stay with one and dig deep, or move from station to station to try things out.

This week we had our two new Cube2 3D printers with a bunch of laptops open to TinkerCad online. We started out printing some pre-designed forms we got with the printers, but the teens jumped right into teaching themselves Tinkercad basics and turning out their own models.

We had an area devoted to Lego Mindstorm and WeDo where a group built some robotic vehicles and a Ferris Wheel.

The last area was a soldering station where people could put the Makerbot badges together. This table will change next week to a more non-electronic craft activity and we feel it might be fun to cross pollinate the high and low tech projects to see what might come of it down the road!

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3D Printing Signs for the Library Collection

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Our most popular makerspace/STEM/Library of Things

As of April 2018, we did a kit circulation report. We had 106 kits which have circulated 1,047 times since it's inception in 2015. Here is the top 10 list of most circulated. These include hobby kits, puzzles, cake pans, instruments, science robots/STEM, and American Girl dolls. The ukulele kits (we have one soprano and one concert kit) have been around the longest and have circulated 106 times total. Just remember someone should change the strings yearly and definitely include a tuner (we like the snark) as new strings on a uke take a while to break in. Surprisingly our meditation toolbox comes in second with 51 checkouts. It is just some CDs and a DVD. This one has also been around since the inception of our kits. Next up is our virtual reality headset toolbox. It is a Homido Virtual Reality headset. If that is too pricey, I recommend Google Cardboard. Our sewing machine comes in 5th. Knitting is a great idea fo...

Cozmo has a new brother, VECTOR!

If Amazon Alexa and Cozmo got together and had a kid it would be Vector , the latest from the Anki company. You can ask Vector "Alexa" questions like "what's the weather?" plus he he has all the charm of Cozmo. He can recognize your face, he has better motion sensors (so he doesn't fall off the table like Cozmo tends to do), and he knows when to go back to his space to recharge. He's more like your personal assistant than a robot child who always wants to play games with you and WIN. He has a timer, built in camera (you can ask him to take a picture), and can play Blackjack with you. He also syncs with Alexa so you can add items to a shopping list, set reminders, control household devices, and more. He will even come when called! I love their website. They joke around about the "robot evil overloads" because once you see it, you know we're all thinking it. Good thing he's still tiny.

LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

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