LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

Today we started with a Makerspace initiative teaching basic soldering to our Middle school rapscallions, the PHILS, with the super "newbie-friendly" Maker badge. Suzanne and I felt pretty confident based on our previous tinkering... We were able to refresh our own soldering know-how while giving our antsy Middle Schoolers the training they needed while they had their after-school snacks. Thank goodness for youtube video tutorials. Here's the one we watched: http://makezine.com/2007/01/05/soldering-tutorial-make-v/ Lo and behold, the guys dove right in without hesitation and, after a few false starts (be sure to buy a couple extra kits), they all got their badges to light up! Then, in the evening, we shifted gears and hosted Kerrie Capraro and her awesome family of Suburban Homesteaders as they presented, Raising Chickens in the Suburbs ! Wow. They really made their case for this exciting family project - so many wonderful experiences that enrich family life...

              Check out our video of the day Collaborating between the teen and children's departments, we had fun bringing many of our newly experienced maker projects to a wider (and younger) audience.  On Saturday, August 17th, we held a Cardboard Carnival indoors and on the adjacent tennis court. It featured Stomp Rockets, an Angry Birds Catapult, and more. A Take-Apart Room held many broken mechanical and electrical devices on tables with tools available to all who cared to gently unscrew covers, lift out hard drives, remove batteries, separate components. One of our summer friends, Linnea, who comes down from Vermont every summer and who participated in our weekly Do-It-Yourself Club, the PHILS, supervised. She's 11 years old. Another PHILS member, Stephen, with the help of our Children's Librarian, Jessica Lamarre, showed people how a Makey Makey microprocessor works with metallic tape and the human body to recreate a form of Dance ...

We had a session today with the popular MaKey MaKey kits: a conductor board, alligator clips and a USB cable. Using the kits, laptops, and online games and instruments, we explore the variety of ways we can create input and controls. Replacing the space key and the mouse click with bananas and asparagus spears linked by alligator clips and a grounding link, we discover the random aspects of linkage and replacement. Finding a way to make a joy stick with paper and heavy graphite lines on it makes it clear how things work... what else can we do with these fun tools?  Watch and wait for that to be revealed. Limitations include needing a laptop for each MaKey MaKey and the need for reliable Internet connectivity, though that was blessedly not compromised at this session. I think there were fewer folks in the building using mobile devices so our Wifi connections were unimpeded.