Our own Kathy Ceceri is attending World Maker Faire New York this coming weekend and giving a talk on "Low Tech/No Tech Robotics Projects for Kids" on Sunday. In the meantime, I've finally got some facts and photos about my own experience at Portland's first mini Maker Faire from two weekends ago.
First off: a "mini" Maker Faire is definitely a lot smaller than the Bay Area and New York versions, but it doesn't mean you'll be able to see and do everything there in a couple of hours. I took my kids on Saturday and ended up staying most of the day, and then went back on Sunday for a few more hours — and that was with me hustling the kids along.
A few facts: There were 4,850 people attending (not bad for the first one, particularly considering all the other things going on in Portland that weekend), with 85 exhibitors and 9 food carts. The exhibitors brought along about 350 volunteers, and OMSI also recruited about 100 volunteers to help with the Maker Faire in general.
One of our favorite things were the trebuchets set up near the waterfront: there were several smaller trebuchets that you could use to launch wiffle balls and tennis balls, and the kids had a lot of fun with those.
But the really impressive one was the one in the back. They launched it a couple of times an hour, and used a small forklift to bring the arm back down to firing position.
You can see the counterweight in this photo: it has 360 pounds attached to it, and when the arm is upright it stands 22 feet tall.
We saw them launch a water jug and a couple of pumpkins, and when they weren't firing we went to check out the carnage — the pumpkins and watermelons were completely demolished. I got this brief video of two launches of the trebuchet:
Next up: mini Maker Faire in photos!
One of the first things we tried was the spin painting. The bigger setup (pictured above) featured a stationary bike with a big spinning turntable. You stuck the paper down in the drum with a magnet, and then dripped paint on it while somebody pedaled the bike for you. I really like how these turned out.
The smaller version used salad spinners (and you can see them in the background of the photo with the bike): you drop a small piece of paper into the salad spinner, add some paint, and then shut the lid and spin away. Of course, you probably don't want to use these for salad anymore after that.
Another fun project was the MaKey MaKey booth. I'd just gotten my Kickstarter-backed kit in the mail this week but hadn't gotten to try it out yet, so it was cool to be able to try it out with some help. They had two of them set up: one controlled lights and played music (just four notes) and the other was a drum kit with five different sounds.
We spent some time working on a guitar: I put four buttons on the neck for the four notes, and then cut up the copper tape to make the "strings" of the guitar the ground. That way, you could touch the neck of the guitar to select a note, and then strum the guitar to play the notes. One change I would make is making larger gaps between the "strings" because you don't really get a strumming sound.
We chatted with Jay Silver, the creator of MaKey MaKey, and he admired our guitar. One interesting thing was that when I tried to play it, I couldn't get it to work — my hands were apparently too dry. At first we thought maybe the ground connection was loose, but my daughter could play it just fine. (Jay, if you're reading this: I tried again at home, and got the same results. Unless I moisten my fingertips a little bit, I get nothing.)
My younger daughter opted for the pencil-drawn drum set. We drew some various shapes, colored them in and drew thick lines to the edges for the alligator clips, and hooked it up to the drum machine. Let me tell you: the feeling of tapping on a *pencil *drawing and having it play sounds is simply flabbergasting.
We did see a few robots around: some kids had their FIRST robots on display. We saw the hoops-shooting robot early on, and then later in the day there were a few robots just cruising around in the parking lot as well.
We met a couple folks from the Alter Egos Society, a superhero cosplay group that had a Make-Your-Own-Mask workshop. My younger daughter liked her mask so much she wore it for much of the rest of the day.
We got to try out a couple types of prints. John Isaacson of Unlay let my kids make a print of a weird bat creature, and I saw Man vs. Ink had some cool screenprinting as well.
...and there was block printing. Etchpop is a Kickstarter-funded project which sells little laser-cut block printing kits.
We made a little Maker Faire robot print, and then put it in the Etchpop print dryer: it's a wooden box with a space heater in the top.
Etchpop is a cool idea. You can get their designs or have them make a block with your own design, and they come in different sizes. If I have any block-printing ideas I may check this out later.
Nearby was a booth called Criminal Crafts, with various crafty projects "for scoundrels and armchair detectives," according to their website. What my kids liked most was the mug shot: they had a variety of dress-up items and a little placard, and you could get a photo with the height scale. My younger daughter took her costume cues from her older sister. And, yes, I know "criminal" is spelled wrong. I resisted the urge to correct it.
Over at the back of the Maker Faire we found Academia Duellatoria, a school of historic western martial arts. More importantly, they had swords. My kids were immediately drawn to the big rack of swords and the (older) kids in the roped-off tent practicing swordfighting. Academia Duellatoria teaches swordsmanship: grappling, knife fighting, rapier and dagger, sword and buckler, and longsword.
My kids are a little young for this yet. They got to check out the plastic practice knives, and they did get to hold a rapier briefly but it was too tempting to swing it around with lots of other people nearby. Maybe something to keep in mind for when they're older...
Over to the left I've got a photo of the mini catapult kit made at OlyMEGA, a hackerspace in Olympia, Washington. It's a cute little laser-cut kit, powered by a twisted-up string, and they were launching Cheerios as a demo. Unfortunately it's not available for sale online at this point, but it's a cool idea, similar to the flatpack trebuchet that was on Kickstarter a while back.
I met a guy named Andy Wilcock who had a home-made CNC machine. You could doodle with a pen and tablet on the computer, and then once you hit "Print" it would send it to the machine, which would copy your drawing using a pen. What caught my eye, though, was that he had an Etch-a-Sketch there that had modified knobs, and I asked if he used the CNC to control the Etch-a-Sketch. He did, but said he'd had some trouble with the way the knobs sometimes have a little give to them, so it's not as precise. I'm still hoping for a way to record and play back my Etch-a-Sketch drawings, so I may be bugging Wilcock about this a little more in the future.
We saw a whole lot of MakerBots and other 3D printers, as well as a lot of other laser-cut things. Epilog Laser was even there showing off their laser cutters, though most of the other exhibitors were showing things they'd made with a laser cutter.
Another craft that I found fascinating (and wanted to add to my long list of things to learn) was the paper marbling at Danny Ebru's booth. He had his art on display, made with multiple exposures, but he had a couple of trays where you could make a little bookmark with the marbling. You drip the colors onto the surface of the water, shape it with toothpicks, and then drop the treated paper onto the surface, where it picks up a "snapshot" of the current swirls and splots of color.
No Maker Faire would be complete without some blinking LEDs, of course. Surplus Gizmos, a site that sells all sorts of gizmos and gadgets, had some LED bug kits ready: a battery, two LEDs, plus pipe cleaners and springs and diodes for decoration. My kids each made a blinky bug to take home.
Of course, this is just a fraction of what we saw. We got to check out OMSI's Pepco Exhibit Shop, a huge fab shop where they put together stuff for their museum displays. They had a couple samples of things on display that you could try out, some past exhibits and some in progress. I met a couple folks from PIGSquad (Portland Indie Games Squad) who were showing off various projects from their members, like Yono, a collaborative pixel-art project that's currently on Kickstarter, and Chipworm, a chiptunes-based zine by Sasha Orma. As I said before, there were piles and piles of ideas and projects and we wanted to do them all.
But I'll stop there. If you're in the area of a Maker Faire, it's definitely worth your while to take your kids — you're sure to find some excellent activities, and I guarantee you'll find at least one thing (most likely many more) that will amaze you.
