LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

As an experiment, I tried to make my own 3D printed Lego head using Tinkercad and our Ultimaker 2 3D Printer. You will need: Testors Modeling Paint EZ Digital Caliper (only if you don't use my measurements or want to teach the tool) Pre-made Lego bodies to test 3D printer Tinkercad With the digital caliper, I was able to get precise measurements using a pre-made Lego head and body.  You can introduce the students to using a caliper or you can skip this part since the measurements are already done. It wasn't exactly what the caliper measured of course because you have to leave a few .mm as wiggle room. Here is my project to copy and tinker. The hole inside the orange cylinder is the one that needs to be exact. It is 5.5mm X 5.05mm. All other measurements and shapes can be played with to make huge "Bobble-head" like Lego heads. You can easily delete the hat and ears if you want a standard Lego head or get funkier. After the meticulousness of painting ...

This year was our most successful Hour of Code yet (IMHO). We had lots going on and it was pretty noisy in the kids room. Hour of Code on the website was assigned for homework so I don't have accurate stats on that but I did try to keep track of the extension activities with pictures and video . So here is the reflection on the week after the previous blog post about setup: As I have previously mentioned, every library has great services and events but how do we market them effectively? The most successful marketing strategy for us has been leaving demo projects out on the children's help desk. We had many conversations over the past week about Lego WeDo Robotics because the Ferris Wheel, which was built by a student during Tinkering Tuesdays, was on display for kids to ask about. As soon as we reeled them in, we could say, "If you have 30 minutes you can build one yourself today!"  Consequently, this also helped all the staff to learn how to do a quick progra...

Yesterday, we began a new format for running our Tinkering Tuesday sessions. It's drop-in, it's open to 6th grade and up. We have three activities with three librarians running them and people can stay with one and dig deep, or move from station to station to try things out. This week we had our two new Cube2 3D printers with a bunch of laptops open to TinkerCad online. We started out printing some pre-designed forms we got with the printers, but the teens jumped right into  teaching themselves Tinkercad basics and turning out their own models. We had an area devoted to Lego Mindstorm and WeDo where a group built some robotic vehicles and a Ferris Wheel. The last area was a soldering station where people could put the Makerbot badges together. This table will change next week to a more non-electronic craft activity and we feel it might be fun to cross pollinate the high and low tech projects to see what might come of it down the road!