When someone takes the ball and runs with it....!

Yesterday, as we wrapped up our last Arduino Interactive Wall building sessions, Lily showed me the Simon Says exercise she finished. This led us to discuss, "What next?" We decided, together, that we'll take a little hiatus, have our big Grand Reveal of the wall in a display setting where people can come by, ask us questions, take photos, get some good press for the library, and then we'll use our Tinkering Tuesdays to really dig deeper into C coding language and 3D printing to learn how to write our own code and light up a diorama of 3D printed replicas of famous (and not so famous) places around the world... Having the group make the decisions is a way to get buy-in and create a sense of continuity from project to project....

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3D Printing Signs for the Library Collection

Last weekend, I went to the annual Tee-Off mini golf event at the Brookline Public Library. As a first time visitor, I was mini-golfing with my phone at the ready. Special thanks to the AMAZING librarian rockstar Robin Brenner for so many great ideas. It truly is worth a visit just to see her teen room. Here are a few 3D printing/marketing ideas to takeaway: Having a 3D printer filtration cart would be wonderful in our library. Look at the price if you dare. Right now I have to go downstairs to retrieve prints because we are concerned about the fumes and little hands touching anything while the printer is on. I have a video camera set up downstairs using an iPad 2 and the free app called Presence for monitoring but sometimes I do forget to keep checking the presence website while I'm on the desk especially since it makes this annoying beeping sound to say, "Are you still watching?!"..As the sign reveals on the cart, the propensity to want to lean or...

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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