LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

This week as part of a Mass. Library Association Youth Services Section Workshop at the Turner Free Library, I took our popular STEM toys, Arduinos, littleBits, and Makey Makeys to offer local librarians hands on time with these products and to share my programming experiences. Noelle Boc from Tewksbury Public Library presented on her popular Hexbugs parties . We also talked about iPad implementation and new marketing strategies. A link to all our handouts and presentations can be found soon on the YSS wiki.  With the new emphasis on STEM programming, there aren't many opportunities to try before you buy with so many new businesses coming from Kickstarter and other start up internet based only companies. (Although a special announcement that littleBits will now be offered at select Radioshacks around the country.)    So librarians out there, be thinking about the toys that you have to share with your local librarian community to support and enhance their professio...

We are very excited to announce that we were the next featured case study on the littleBits education blog .  High fives all around for the hard work of our staff and students who were eager to learn circuitry with us over the past year.

We had a great time in the children's room this week making Halloween decorations for our Tinkering Thursday class for grades 4 & 5 using littleBits.  Besides the littleBits, this program cost $7 in Halloween decorations at the local dollar store.  We are fortunate to have littleBits deluxe kits as well as base kits to mix and match.   The most important thing to have extra is:   *blue power bits and batteries (since a 9V battery can only power so many bits at once and you can't add extra power circuits onto your original).   *orange wire bits (to extend their led lights or buzzers off of the circuit bases). I began the one hour class by opening the kits and having kids experiment with all the bits available, towards the 20 minute mark I showed them all the decorations they had to work with and they began thinking about how they could design circuits that went with it.This is where the orange wire bits came in handy .   One thing I w...

In the YA & Children's department, we are gearing up for Halloween using Arduino and littleBits. How cool would it be to do homemade Halloween interactive props? Every year we say that we want to do a Haunted House and this is our first step in the right direction. littleBits just released some Halloween inspired projects: creepy picture frames , pumpkins, & EL wire wearables using the Deluxe kits. We will be using these as a baseline for ideas in our Tinkering Thursday Halloween projects on October 16th. My hope is that they could be put on display until Halloween (if they aren't too scary). As an advanced project for the middle school DIY Club, we are going to be using the Sparkfun Arduino Inventors Kit to go through the manual for 2 weeks practicing breadboard circuitry and preset Arduino programming. They have a great easy to understand manual with detailed pictures for beginners. From there, we have researched Halloween based projects for further explorati...

Last Wednesday the children's room hosted a Mad Scientist Lego Challenge night for families. This coincided nicely with our upstairs Lego Contest display. I'm really getting into themed weeks at the library for programming although the caveat would be if someone was on vacation that week, they'll miss out on everything surrounding the theme but as librarians we learn that we can't always please everyone (but we sure try hard!). Upon entry to the night, participants were given a bingo card and asked to complete at least 3 of the 9 challenges. We had 9 different challenges around the room: Challenges: Can you building something that... 1: Survives the zip-line 2: Goes down the ramp 3: using littleBits 4: using just one color 5: using 2 x 2 bricks only 6: Stop motion 7: Lego firewalk (this one differed in our other challenges. We told the parents we'd like them to experience what it was like to step on a random Lego. In true kid fashion, they all said the wa...

Every year as children's librarians we ask ourselves, "What am I going to do when I visit the schools to promote summer reading?" We love schools visits. They have a direct impact on our summer reading statistics. Where else can you talk to a captive audience of 100 + kids who begin coming in THAT DAY to sign up? I cannot tell you how many years I have seen the summer reading report at the end of the year change based on which elementary school I had/had not visited in previous jobs. But once you get your foot in the door, how do you excite an auditorium full of kids who are eagerly counting down the days till the school is over? Some librarians act out plays, sing songs, dress in costumes, bring props or just rely on some personality and a loud voice.  This year, with science as the theme, it was an easy sell for me to incorporate littleBits into our poster props. Although ideally I had wanted to master Arduino by now, we have been too busy planning for summer events to...

For a full year, we have held a weekly tech session for young teens - mostly eighth grade boys. We played with Little Bits, Legos, MaKey MaKey, soldering, construction projects, programming challenges, and more. Though we regret girls haven't participated, we have some plans to grow in a more inclusive direction. More about that in another post. What we DID accomplish by holding weekly sessions,  was an experiment in content and form. We tried a variety of skill-building sessions, physical and intellectual challenges and learned a lot about what we can and cannot do in an after school setting at the public library. Today, we did a "dress rehearsal" for the Open House we are planning for next Tuesday afternoon at 3:30 p.m. - to which we hope many kids and adults come! Learning how things work is, ultimately more important to us then magically assembling things that fly, move, interact, etc. It's super seductive to merely assemble cool stuff, but we feel it is a...

We have these origami trees on our children's help desk that one of our talented staff made for her winter themed display and they received so many compliments and questions that we made a QR code sign that directly led people to the instructions.  The desk has been one of those places traditionally kept without advertisements but so much attention made me start to wonder... As librarians, we tend to get flyer crazy. I've walked into many libraries where there are signs and flyers everywhere: No cellphones, No food or drink, Musical guest this Sunday, Printing- 15 cents a page, or Please sign up at the desk (just to name a few). You can see that it might be overload for anyone walking in especially if they are trying to chase a 2 year old around. But how to engage the child without text? And so begins my marketing experiment, based on all the excitement and interest in the origami trees at the desk, it seems like this would be a great place to start marketing STEM programs ...

One of the challenges of using a multi-purpose room is that we have to clean up after 1 1/2 hours. Either we disassemble things to store away or we try to choose projects that are quickly finished. But we still want to challenge folks in new ways and not give them busy work. Smaller projects like the following ones are opportunities to learn a new skill that might lead a youth or adult to explore further on their own. Bristle Bots   Solo cup w/ DC motor Solder a Maker Badge Franken-Elmo Take Apart Programming with Scratch or Hopscotch Skyping with an expert Soldering a Drawdio Take Apart Table Wearable electronics - sparkle bow Knitting squares to make a blanket Building with Keva planks Stop motion with iPad and iStopMotion Resources include: Make Magazine littleBits Keva planks Adafruit kits Duxbury Transfer Station MaKey MaKey Instructables DIY.org ...

Adult and teen explore wearable electronics together. Sometimes I feel we have let our passion run amok in terms of "developmentally appropriate" sensitivity in planning programs.  Isn't it just as much fun to have excited adults join turned on teens and enthusiastic elementary students in exploring the possibilities of Little Bits electronics, sewing, soldering, cardboard construction? Why can't we have more intergenerational experiences in our Makerspaces? Do we have to segregate by age so finely? Dad and son explore the Hour of Code together...  At the Duxbury Free Library, some of the push back is going to be driven by our new effort to have more experiences available casually and not so much in a program format. Having a "Little Bits" Bar and table with Legos and other construction experiences available for the casual library visitor could be an enticement to sign up for a class or Tinkering session. We have lots of teens and childre...

Cardboard kitties do cool stuff with Little Bits I just borrowed a set of Little Bits from the Children's Room tonight to try them out in the hope that we can get some quick traction in electronics without relying on an "expert" or a ringer. Success! Check out the wonderful TED talk by Little Bits creator, MIT Media Lab alum, Canadian of Lebanese Arab background,   Ayah Bdeir ,  (she got a B.A. from the American University of Beirut before she got her M.A. at the MIT Media Lab). This is a quintessential example of the global brain trust. Plus, she doesn't quite look like the stereotypical engineer... Ayah Bdeir Little bits are pre-assembled circuits, held together by magnets, color-coded to make the relationship between Power, Input, Wire, Output. It's that simple, but that's what gives it so much power. It teaches the relationship between components from the get-go. I'm excited to challenge the teens tomorrow with some building schematics....

For four Mondays this summer, the DFL children's room transformed into a place to create and experiment with innovative STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) themes as part of our library Makerspace.   This was our first experiment with Makerspace programming in the children's department. On our first Monday, we set out KEVA planks for families to use their imagination to build structures. A simple instruction handout is given with each set of 200 which provides examples and a short tutorial on proper building techniques. KEVA planks are perfectly balanced. They require no glue or other assembly assistance.  Most structures can be built with 50-100 planks but it is handy to have multiple boxes.  Buildings, trees, and even a marble run was created over the course of our 2 hour drop in program.  We now have a set of planks out among our various board games to encourage free play.  It was inspiring to see everyone dive right in and work on bal...