LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

My Strawbees came into the mail today! How exciting! I ordered the 368 piece kit for $50. I opened the box to my only complaint about the item. It contained sheets of the connectors. I had to hand pull off every single piece with a kit of 368 pieces. It made me wish I had a volunteer handy. Make sure you have a hole punch because the middle circles of each piece all need to be taken out too. All the pieces were separated into small Tupperware containers for later use and I got to work. Engineering attempt #1 Like most maker space tinkering activities, there are going to be those students who don't know where to start (neither did I honestly). You can build ANYTHING. That's alot of possibilities! So I thought, why not a helicopter so I have something that moves? My first attempt right out of the box without instructions was less than stellar. So I consulted the internet and used this lampshade strawbee tutorial to begin with a cube. My favorite part of the tut...

If you are looking for a short, low cost project to do with your Makey Makeys, this one is sure to be a big hit. It's a great small group project as well as an eye catching interactive display in some noisy area of the library (as long as you can keep library staff sane). This was made as part of our Tinkering Tuesdays lab. We had low tech cardboard construction, 3D printing, and the Makey floor piano going on simultaneously. It took us about 1.5 hours with 3 teens helping. Materials List: Aluminum Tape $12 Duct Tape (any color) $2 Makey Makey $50 CAT cable (there's one lying around your library trust me) or just use regular wire Wire strippers 12 x 12 x 1.5 in puzzle piece exercise mat $12 white 6 x 8 tarp (but could be smaller) $12 Computer with internet running Scratch This video shows a demonstration with step by step picture instructions and a more detailed video explanation. I got the idea from two sites that I used for consult: Ed Tech Junkies & Mak...

This week was beach week. We headed down to Duxbury Beach on Monday night and held a Mad Scientist Sand Sculpting Event. It was open to all ages without any prizes or contest pressure. The sand sculpture event has been a staple of the summer reading program for many years. Beach sculpting is an art and science of its own. One thing we had to think about was when the tides come in and out. It just took a quick call to the Harbor master to schedule. Holding library events off site is a great opportunity to meet and greet new people. Some families joined into the event just because they happened to be at the beach that night. I loved that the sand sculptures all had their own stories, a wonderful literacy component. This one picture above was a favorite of mine, complete with a light house and guard house. For our weekly Backyard Ballistics on Tuesday, we built boats with DC motors, AA Battery packs, and popsicle sticks. We left out a wide variety of floating materials such as fo...

This week we had perfect weather for some outdoor science activities! Our Mad Scientist Mondays included outdoor stomp rockets.  They are very easy once you get the launchers made (which we did with teens in a separate program). We used PVC pipe, a piece of wood for stabilizing, rubber tubing, and some PVC brackets.  You can also make it entirely out of PVC . Once the launchers are complete, you need 2 liter soda bottles, tape, and paper for rockets to complete the experiment. Discarded magazines and scrap paper come in handy. The most important thing is to leave out a PVC pipe of the same size so kids can measure the width of the pipe. The rocket needs to loosely fit on the launcher. We used this template and edited it to fit our pipes. It is also imperative that there are no air leaks in the rocket so use lots of tape when assembling. What was interesting to note is that our 99 cent generic soda bottles broke only after a few jumps while Sprite bottles held up for 2 hou...

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 ...

 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...

Sometimes it is hard to wrap your brain around a new technology until you see it in action. This weekend I had the opportunity to visit the new MakerBot store on Newbury Street in Boston, MA. If you have not had contact with a 3D printer yet, the MakerBot store offers you a convenient glimpse of multiple 3D printers/scanners in action with examples of a wide range of things to print. The store offers you opportunities to print your own designs or choose an already made design on Thingiverse for a fee. If you don't want to wait for something to print, it also has already made printed objects such as small 3D models of Fenway Park for purchase. For $5, one could obtain a Doctor Who Tardis out of a toy vending machine.  On display in the window were various printed Easter Eggs and rabbits with their attributed designers. Churches, garden gnomes, and even a large samurai bust were on display near each printer. I was amazed at how far the technology has come this year. The quality o...

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...

Great things are happening in Duxbury regarding tinkering and engineering. On Saturday, Jess and I trooped over to the Duxbury High School to see the final result of the robotics teams efforts.  Duxbury senior, Evan Nudd explains it all. Competitions on March 21 and 28th. Go Dragons! Duxbury High School robot explanation from Duxbury Free Library on Vimeo . Here's a link to the team's blog: http://duxburyrobotics.wordpress.com/

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 ...

Thinking that I was taking a week off from the cutting edge of coding and electronics, I prevailed upon Nancy Denman and Jessica Lamarre to borrow their Keva blocks to let the Middle Schoolers play with simple pine planks to see what they might construct. Sure enough, stop the presses. I was caught unawares. The booklet that comes with the Keva blocks was worth a thousand words, of course, and the most thoughtful of our compadres took a moment to look at and read the simple booklet before proceeding. That was their success. Come to find out, Keva blocks teach simple but profound concepts of design and construction.  A tightly webbed inter-locking of the bricks achieves enormous stability and firmness. Check it out for yourself: In addition, we always host a Take Apart Table that encourages teens to dig under the surface and deconstruct the way electronic toys work.