LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

I had been out all weekend walking around catching Pokemon and all that worked payed off as I came into work (EARLY a first) just so I could see if I could win our library gym. I easily defeated the yellow team that was in charge of the gym and now it has become a red team training area. So what does that mean? All weekend I have cavorted around downtown Plymouth, MA and areas of Boston, MA to catch common Pokemon like Pidgeys and Weebles or a few more alluring rare ones that popped up like this Scyther (it's on the Charles River BTW).  By catching even the most common Pokemon duplicates, I earned stardust and candies to evolve my stronger Pokemon to begin taking over gyms. When you first visit a gym (you have to be pretty close to the site in order to battle) you choose a color: red, yellow or blue. Once you have chosen, it is a forever solidified choice. Now I can go to gyms marked RED to train my Pokemon and earn my gym prestige. If I am in charge of the gym, earn coins to...

We have a rambunctious crowd of 5-7 graders for our Tinkering Tuesdays in March so we decided to do a month of movie making with our green screen. Using a green screen is really easy these days. We used iMovie and it was a simple click of a button to replace the screen behind the actors with an image found on the internet after everything had been filmed. Here is a very good tutorial.  Some green screen tips: 1. Make sure green screen is ironed (or unwrinkled somehow and tight). We used binder clips to attach the green screen to our privacy sectional screen but it wasn't ideal. It may causes creases in the background. This was very noticeable during our black campfire scene. 2. Make sure no one wears green or blue or they will look ghostly (unless that is the look you are going for). Fun fact: Lego bases are the exact color of the green screen. She meant to do that. 3. Do not hit the green screen during filming or it will ripple (although it would make a cool ocea...

I stumbled upon 2 websites this week that just amazed me. When any library thinks, "Well what can we actually use a 3D printer for?" These projects would be a great examples of realistic applications that have a direct impact on the community. For the most part I have been focusing on what are the patrons actually going to print on these machines rather than what can we as a library print on these machines? I always love when technology can actually make life better. Dear Zoo Harold and the Purple Crayon Tactile Picture Books Project Thanks to the University of Colorado Boulder we have multiple free thing-averse files that will print picture books that kids can feel along with the braille to read the book. I'm already thinking about putting these on the walls for a temporary display then setting up catalog records where patrons could check the books out once I bind them together.  Depending on how hard it is to make, maybe I could have a program where kids...

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 ...

Another round of weekly summer Mad Science Mondays comes to a close. These were drop in science & art based programs for grades K and up with an adult taking place in the children's room for a 2 hour drop in. We did this for the first time last summer . It was so successful we decided to do it again. Our schedule was as follows: (keeping in mind Superheroes as our summer reading theme) Superhero Gadgets-Use littleBits to make your own gadgets for your hero tool belt Superhero Lairs- Make your own secret hideout Superhero Traps-Make Rube Goldberg inspired designs to capture your enemies Superhero Minions- Build and program your own Lego robot to do your bidding We were fortunate enough to get a donation of refrigerator boxes from a local appliance store to help us with lairs (think about where you can store these before the program. In our case we had a delivery of boxes two months before and things got tight!).  If lairs would be too big to store, I suggest making superh...

Well, we went to the Cape Cod Mini Maker Faire last Saturday and had a blast. Our project table of soldering, 3D designing and 3Doodling was constantly busy and we had to force people to give us a lunch break! Paul Harhen, our Duxbury engineering friend/inventor, showed up in his homemade car that he drove down on the highway. Wow! Much of the fun was connecting with the other folks at the fair - Chris Connors and his Martha's Vineyard teens, the gentle folks from the Truro and Centerville libraries, and folks who had made their very own 3D printers. Getting out to non-library events is a must, we feel, to keep up with all the new things coming down the pike.      

Jessica Lamarre, children's librarian, was excited to be a part of a panel about Library Makerspaces  hosted by littleBits. 

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...

We signed up to be a Makercamp site, sponsored by Google + and Make magazine, who gave us a box of goodies ("swag") in exchange for hosting STEM programming to the public. We now have a plethora of DIY/Maker books, a Makey Makey, an Arduino and breadboard, and a grab bag full of electronic goodies like LEDS, Batteries and 2 soldering irons! FOR FREE. I really hope this continues next year because YA librarians would love this.We were already doing science programming this summer for our theme so this fits in nicely. Each week of Makercamp is themed and can be done entirely online for FREE through Google +, YouTube videos, and links to daily projects. Since you need to be over 13 to have a Google + account some of the projects may need adult supervision and their recommended age is 10-18. They do suggest asking younger family members to ask their parents to log in with their Google + accounts. Every Friday is a virtual field trip with famous celebrities or highlighting n...

We had the privilege of attending a Makerspace in Public Libraries session recently sponsored by the ITS sub-committee of NELA in the beautiful Portsmouth, New Hampshire Public Library. The highlight of it was hearing Bill Derry, the Assistant Director of Innovation and User Experience, talk about how Westport, CT Public Library "does" Makerspace. Here is Bill's  resource page . Download his PPT from this page for use in your library. It's really comprehensive. Major take-aways were: The library is THE place in the community to get people started making.  You don't have to do everything: be the conduit into the Maker World by connecting folks with other Makers and grassroots Makerspaces in your area. Make your programs as intergenerational as possible. Don't assume that just because the schools are getting new equipment (e.g. 3D printers) that the public will have any access to them. Schools have to be very cautious and buttoned down. Libraries are ...

What will the public library look like in the near future? As more and more people access information resources online, the role of the public library is growing and morphing into something beyond a collection of resources to be checked out, used and returned by the community. It is becoming a place where people learn new skills, access hard-to-find and/or expensive hardware and software, and meet up with fellow lifelong learners to stay fit, healthy, mentally alert and have fun! The vision of the 21st century library is a place that is open all week long, all year around, and full of exciting activities and resources that the average citizen may be interested in but may not be comfortable investing in right away. Because the library is open 6-7 days a week, it is the perfect place for the community to come together to learn and then practice newly acquired skills or find others with whom to share a passion or interest. How is this different from a school or community cente...

 Bringing a group of antsy middle school boys to the Cape Cod Mini Maker Faire on Saturday, really brought home the principles of Do It Yourself in a big way. We set up a table for folks to solder a little Maker badge: 2 LEDs, a cell battery holder and a tie tack to hold it on. At the last minute, I threw in a MaKey MaKey kit and the 3 Doodler. Turns out, our table was busier than we could handle and we ran out of material around 1 p.m.! I wish I had brought three times as many badge kits and 3Doodler plastic as I did. Granted, it was another rainy Saturday in a never-ending cold and clammy Spring that hasn't really happened and I think folks are tired of the same old winter routines. The Maker Faire was free, open to everyone and in a great space on the campus of Cape Cod Community College. There was a wide range of exhibitors: 3-D printers, Martha's Vineyard High School's dump-diving go carts, Barnstable High School's great mapping application, Truro...

With the DFL Children's Room recent purchase of ten Sparkfun Inventor's Kits , a number of us boldly went where no DFL librarian had gone before: into the fascinating but brain-cramping world of Arduino: Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board. Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects , taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can communicate with software running on your computer . Luckily, we had as our guide, Kevin Osborn , engineer and Arduino enthusiast. He led our merry band of librarians, trustees, patrons, and teachers, through the jungle of code, into the swamp of breadboards, out ont...

Jessica helps Andrew trouble shoot his Larson Scanner Tinkering is the goal of any Makerspace. It's not enough to have people sign up for pre-planned projects. What we are striving to do is train patrons in skills, give them some experiences to draw from and then let them explore and discover how their own imaginations, skills they have developed and an appreciation for what is possible to build, construct, develop their own projects. Groups are not herded into the same project. Choice is an important component. On Tuesday, we came just a bit closer to the ideal of open tinkering.... Eli, Jackson, Peter, Martin and Stephen build their siege catapults Robert explores the possibilities of our new 3Doodler to "draw" in 3 dimensions. Andrew and Ben work on their Larson Scanners

As national Teen Tech Week approaches, it seems smart and energy-saving to survey my teens and ask them, "What can you provide the library during Teen Tech Week that will be a value-added service to our loyal patrons?" That's what I plan to be asking my incredibly tech savvy teen friends in the up-coming weeks as national Teen Tech Week is March 9 - 15, 2014.  I know we're gonna be doing some awesome stuff....!

If ever there was a mecca of STEAM activities it would be the Exploratorium in SanFrancisco. For decades it has been a leading institution for people of all ages to explore the mysteries and discover the answers to "how" "why" "what" questions in the natural world. They have come out with a new book that the Duxbury Free Library now owns, The Art of Tinkering , by Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich. Here are their tenets: Merge science, art & technology : "...when you mix them together, you get a veritable tinkering trifecta in which technological tools and scientific principles let you express your own artistic vision...."  Create rather than consume : this says it all. Revisit & Iterate on Your Ideas. Use familiar materials in unfamiliar ways Express ideas via construction Prototype rapidly: "When you have a new idea, it's incredibly helpful get it out of your brain as soon as possible - to sketch a design or build a ...