Maker Education is such a valuable role. These stories will bring you the latest information and tales of maker educators who area spreading the maker mindset. Help others learn how to make things or how to think like a maker at makerspaces, schools, universities, and local communities. The importance of maker education can not be understated. We appreciate our educators.
So far on my Zero to Maker journey, I’ve spent a lot of time with the technical aspects of making, with a heavy emphasis on learning the necessary skills to help boost my robotics knowledge. However, this has caused me to overlook one of the most important groups of makers: crafters.
Admittedly, “art” may be, ah, stretching it a bit, but hot-pulling scrap styrene model sprue over an open flame to make plastic rods of various thicknesses is a classic technique in plastic model-building. The resulting material can be as thin as a human hair, and commonly finds use in scale modelling as antenna aerials, wire, bolt heads, etc.
Learn plastic welding through this black-and-white Seelye Model 63 Plastic Welder manual.
Next Saturday, September 17th at 1pm, on the Main Stage at World Maker Faire New York, the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Tom Kalil, will participate in an all-star panel about the impact that making and the maker movement can have on education in the United States. Making, […]
We’ll be making DIY ecosystems — fully self-supporting and sealed from the outside world, with some plants, animals, and a few drops of pond scum, in a Mason jar. These same biospheres sell in airline catalogs for hundreds of dollars.
There’s something about the process of joining two pieces of metal together that captures people’s excitement and curiosity. Outside of a romantic idea of welding masks, torches, and flying sparks, I had no idea what I was getting into. Now that I’ve taken a few classes, I’ve learned enough to distinguish the different types of welds, their uses, and the fact that I have a lot of practice in store before my welds are worth anything.
Yesterday I carved out a bit of end of summer classroom experimentation time. One of the projects I wanted to develop was a student designed ear bud holder. They’ve crossed my radar a bit over the years, but I’ve never really needed one. I used to keep my headphones plugged into my mp3 player, and would put it on a shelf in the house, or in the elbow box in my car. Recently, though, my mp3 player and GPS unit were stolified out of my car. So now my phone seems to have become the ultimate gizmo again. It works pretty well with the music app, and Google Maps has a navigation feature that wasn’t there when I looked before. It would actually be perfect if it had an FM radio for local terrestrial audio. The problem now is, where to keep the tangle of headphone wires.
