Attending the World Maker Faire in NYC

As I was already on New York on family business, I decided to swing by the World Maker Faire at the New York State Hall of Science in Queens on Sunday. It was fun!

Lots of corporate booths and lots of small start-ups were present. One nice thing about it was that there was a lot for all ages of kids to do. There was a construction area for very young children and lots of small venues for talks, which weren't going on when I was there.

The corporate presence was very heavy: Google, Intel, Microsoft, Little Bits, Lego Mindstorm and a host of 3D printer companies all had big tents.

The funny thing is, I feel that we have already done a bunch of the stuff the World Maker Faire was touting: learning to solder, exploring Arduino, building with cardboard, making marble shoots and slides... we'll continue to do these things here in Duxbury, but I'm just as happy that we focused on attending the Cape Cod Maker Faire each year as opposed to making the huge investment of time and money to attend the World Maker Faire as a group.

There were high schools, local fab labs, and tech clubs in the mix as well which was fun to see.

Demonstrations included robotics and lots and lots of drones.

This last photo shows a fun aspect of the Faire, though: circus technology. This demo showed how levers and pulleys work and the Big Apple Circus had some inventive group bicycles zooming around. This shows the creative range of marrying technology with the arts - something we are especially interested in.

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LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

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