LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

Pokemon Go has been getting steadily quieter in New England, as the craze of this summer hit critical mass then slowly as the weather got worse brought out only the die hard fans with unlimited data plans on their phone ::ahem:: Level 31 thank you very much. I still get beaten out of our library gym every few days and I still see some kids playing but it has not been on the tip of anyone's tongues since the holidays hit.  The holidays tried to keep the fervor up by offering special incentives during Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and the lastly on Valentine's Day. Special Pokemon increased spawn rates, candies were doubled, lures lasted for 6 hours, etc. as long as you logged in during the week of the holiday and kept up with the app updates. For those who need a refresher, look at this earlier blog post .  You may or may not know that Niantic released a huge update last Thursday, adding 80 new Pokemon called "Generation 2" that are available to catch. Most ...

I was so excited to get the robot, Cozmo from Anki which I have been drooling over since before Christmas. He is finally available for purchase on Amazon  for $180.  He lives up to the hype and then some.  My one hiccup so far has been syncing him to one of our iPads through Apple Configurator.  I had to unsupervise the device completely because the free app needs an iTunes account attached to the iPad to run. Once I installed it from the iPad directly rather than through Configurator it worked fine. If you have no idea what I am talking about, you probably use gift cards to purchase apps rather than the Volume Purchasing program.  If you wanted him available for patron checkout, he can be synced to multiple devices (just not more than one running at the same time). He will remember all his learning so once you unlock games for the first time he will remember from one device to another. He also remembers everyone "he meets" so if you run the meet Cozmo fea...

Since we have to worry about limiting hours of printing to when we are open learning to split items in Tinkercad is a very handy skill. I split this Disney castle that I found on Tinkercad for a student's Florida project. It was going to be over 10 hours so I split it in half so we didn't have to "print overnight". I tried to split this object in CURA first but no luck.  A little bit of superglue and this one will be ready to go. Just be sure that you don't adjust the size while in Cura because the halves won't sync up.