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Showing posts with the label skill-building

Starting the Arduino interactive garden mural

We are starting to paint our garden, designed and facilitated by Duxbury artist, Sally Dean, on the plastic blue partition wall. The garden elements are being 3D printed by the kids and teens and today we will begin learning from Kevin Osborn, how to write Arduino code to make the servos that power the interactivity work! This is a big, on-going project, which is just the kind of thing we feel sparks creativity and BIG thinking in a Makerspace. Tools and equipment: Portable Partition from Minnesota company Acrylic paints , brushes, drop clothes, etc. Gridding out the garden design with a wax pencil Arduino kits from Sparkfun Lots of extra sensors and stuff from Adafruit Riley thought to glue gun details on that she had 3Doodled.

The New Reference: Teaching tools, Skill-building

As we adjust our print reference collection to suit the needs of the community, monies open up that we can spend on resources our patrons are excited to use - specifically ten seats in our building for Lynda.com and the full Adobe Creative Suite in our new Digital Media Lab. Our patrons are looking for services too expensive to purchase in a home setting and the skills to use creative digital products. We have discovered another service we can provide. David Murphy was able to give a practical class on buying and selling on Ebay last night using our subscription to Lynda.com as well as the Digital Media Lab and his own experience on Ebay. Suzanne Gunnerson held a similar class in July on mastering the Windows 8 operating system. By using video classes, we can learn together, stop the video, answer questions, restart, jump ahead, or re-watch an exercise we might not have fully understood. We find that our patrons enjoy getting an overview togther with others and THEN coming back ...