At Maker Faire, we can all be teachers and learners
The maker community is vibrant because it is always learning and sharing
I have come to see Maker Faire as an educational event, but not in the conventional sense. I mean that Maker Faire brings together a wide variety of people who are good learners and who share what they know and what they can do with others. The maker community is a learning community where all of us can be teachers and learners, engineers and artists, scientists and designers. As Massimo Banzi, the founder of Arduino once said: “At Maker Faire, it’s cool to be smart.”
In the early years of Maker Faire, we began offering free tickets to teachers and many came. I started asking them why they were coming. Many replied that they were looking for projects for their kids who were bored at school. They wanted them to have rich learning experiences, use their imagination and develop technical and creative capabilities.
Because Maker Faire is a family-oriented, I got to watch kids at the event and see how their eyes lit up. They were inspired by the makers and their projects. Maker Faire has hands-on activities, like soldering, to engage kids and adults. Yet I wondered back then how those kids who were inspired at Maker Faire could become makers themselves. Kids needed to have access to tools, materials and expert guidance. It led eventually to a group of us starting MakerEd in 2012 to promote makerspaces in schools and train maker educators to work with students at every grade level. A makerspace provides students with the opportunity to learn by doing and to develop projects based on their own ideas and interests.
Some of the makers are actually teachers
Last week, I did a livestream with about 8 makers coming to Maker Faire. Two of them were teachers, Sara Bolduc and Becca Priddy, both of whom are from Portland, OR.
Sara Bolduc is bringing Glow Plushies activity to Maker Faire Bay Area.
“They light up,” she told me. “This year, they’re sewable — in the past, they’ve been hot-glued. They’re just felt fabric with laser cut designs: a mouth or eyes and mustache, with different shapes.”
“I’m a maker educator, and that’s what I’ve been doing since I graduated from college,” she said. “I stumbled upon Maker Faire. The first Faire I went to was back in 2010 and I realized I had found my people. I was working with kids then at an Intel Computer Clubhouse, doing technology and art and then finding the maker world.”
Glow Plushies was a project she came up with, working with students in the makerspace. “I had a girls program called LunaTech. It was an afterschool program to get girls into technology specifically and keep them engaged. And all the girls at the time really loved to do drawing projects. One of the kids drew this creature and I laser cut it. We asked ourselves: what can we do with it? So we made it a plushy.”
Sara said that the students learned how to sew and then we were hot-gluing the pieces together. “I asked, what else can we do with it? We can add an LED and we learned about circuits and making a simple switch,” said Sara.
Sara is bringing Glow Plushy as a kit this year. “I’m really excited to be making kits again with kids and then offering them for sale as well,” she said.
Becca Priddy
Becca is a middle-school special-education teacher in Portland. She is bringing one of her Dimensional Dreams projects. “They are very detailed shadow boxes like this one from my original series that has about 300 LEDs in it,” she said. “But I’m bringing a much larger one, my Coral Reef. It’s four-feet wide by four-feet tall and it’s three-feet deep; it’s very large.”
She started making these projects in 2017 or 2018. “At the time, I was a behavior specialist and we were teaching about mindfulness and meditation and how it can help with mental health.”
“I teach in a Title I school. It’s a very impoverished school. One of the first things that you do when you’re teaching mindfulness is think of your happy place. A lot of my students don’t have a happy place. They may not have had the opportunity to have much of a childhood or a happy place.
“At the same time I was developing these art projects, I said that I’m gonna build my happy place and then I’m gonna share it with my students. So the very first one was a shadow box of a photograph that I had taken at Superstition Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s where I’m from and it has saguaros and the mountains.
“I figured out how to do lighting. Dimensional Dreams really helped me figure all these things out. This wasn’t what I went to school for. I went to school for theater and lighting design and education and biology. I went to school a lot. But I was inspired by the colors of the sunset and the desert.
“I brought the box in to my school, the Superstition Mountain one, and my students sat in front of it and they were just staring off into space. I said, so what are you thinking about? And they said, “Nothing.” I said that’s meditation. So I collaborated with other artists and we found what is your happy place.”
Becca said that the experience on this project has created a connection for her to engineering. “I almost feel like I should have been an engineer now that I’m making all of these things.
“It’s interesting from my perspective to come at engineering from an artist perspective. When I meet other makers, they’re like, “Wait, you know what you want it to look like and do before you make it?” I’m like, yeah.”
Some of the makers are actually students
We not only have teachers; we have students at Maker Faire Bay Area like Dorian Todd.
Dorian Todd
Dorian called into the livestream from his dorm room at San Jose State where he is a first-year engineering student.
He hosts the Full Contact Engineering booth at Maker Faire and his featured project is an electronic tic-tac-toe board. The board is made up of nine displays and each one of those displays can be actuated up and down. “It gives this tactile digital feel when you’re pressing down on these little LED displays to do the tic-tac toe motions,” he said.
“When I was testing this, I found out that tic-tac toe is probably one of the most shallow games. Either you win because someone made a mistake, or you get a tie, which happens almost every time. So I was thinking, what’s the simplest way I could make this a more engaging experience?
“I figured out if you only let each player place down three symbols total — so after they place their fourth, the first one you placed goes away — it means that someone will inevitably have to win. And it turns out it makes the game so much deeper and you’re thinking that’s a great idea and you’re engaged.”
Dorian’s parents went to the first-ever Maker Faire Bay Area. “The moment I was born, they brought me to Maker Faire Bay Area,” he said. “Every time I would go and see these incredible projects and get so excited about it. But I felt like nothing I had built as a little kid was cool enough.
“Over Covid, I learned a bunch of new skills. When I heard Maker Faire was coming back in 2023 and I was like, I want to do it this time. I’m gonna get out there and inspire some kids with the projects I’ve done.”
Why do people make?
On the livestream, Evgeni from the audience asked the following blunt question in the chat window.
How do people find enough motivation to spend all that time and money building things unnecessary for their life?
Here were three replies:
I’m driven by joy. I love making, and people love to see what I make.
Many projects also are great ways to build experience, so I often see it as an investment in my skills.
My favorite thing about making is learning new skills! By making art projects I’ve learned everything from basic soldering skills, to programming LEDs! I really enjoy making new connections with artists and makers too!
That pretty much explains what’s special about the maker community and why it’s incredible to bring everone together over Maker Faire Bay Area weekend. Please join in the fun.
Presentations
If you are an educator or parent coming to Maker Faire Bay Area, check out the presentations and workshops on our Schedule page. There are too many good talks to list them here.