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‘Maker Names (not publicly visible) Kimberly McCollum|Shea Zuckerman



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School Maker Faire

School Maker Faire

School Maker Faires are collaborative, innovative, generative, and fun. These in-school events celebrate invention, creativity, and resourcefulness. Students can show what they’ve made and share what they’ve learned with others—a great match for any educational community.  In short, making develops thinkers and doers with the skills to excel in and innovate the future.

Why Host a School Maker Faire?

School Maker Faire organizers can be teachers, parents, administrators, and even students. Makers are primarily students—individuals, clubs, classes, or groups. The result of a School Maker Faire? A student body bursting with creative invention and excited to get more into making and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math).

Showcase the making already taking place on campus.
Replace a more limited science fair model.
Connect with larger creativity, innovation, STEM, or art initiatives.
Cultivate awareness of the global Maker movement.
Develop and integrate the school community in new ways. 

Program Criteria

The School Maker Faire program is intended for K-12 (or international equivalent) schools of any type (public, private, or charter) and is produced by and for that school community.

  • School Maker Faire organizers can be students, teachers, administrators, parents, or community organizations or any combination thereof.
  • The focus of School Maker Faire is to showcase individual or group student projects. Projects can be from any discipline (science, art, math, sports, etc.) or interdisciplinary.
  • School Maker Faires are not promoted beyond the immediate school community, except by personal invitation.
  • Online visibility of a School Maker Faire is limited to current school websites or existing social media feeds. Standalone online and social media presence with “Maker Faire” in the name is not allowed.
  • Registration for a single School Maker Faire license is $99.99, annually. You will need to re-register your event each year you produce it.
  • Upon completing registration, you receive access to resources in our School Maker Faire hub.

If you are hoping to develop a multi-school, city-wide, or regional event, or are a university or other post-secondary institution, please fill out our Maker Faire Interest Form. More information about our Community Maker Faire Program can be found HERE.

School Maker Faire Membership Provides

Registered School Maker Faires are part of a diverse international community of educators and students committed to developing maker education and broadening its impact. Since 2015, the School Maker Faire program has been helping schools of all shapes and sizes showcase the work of their students and inspiring educators and community leaders to expand opportunities for maker education and innovate hands-on and learning-by-doing curricula and programs. With an annual membership you receive:

  • Membership to Make: Community, including permission to use the Maker Faire name in the title of your event.
  • A customizable School Maker Faire logo to represent your event.
  • Representation on the Maker Faire map.
  • The School Maker Faire Playbook—a how-to guide to help you develop your faire.
  • Access to online content, including project curriculum and video library, throughout the year.
  • Opportunities for field trips with awesome makers from across the globe!
  • Access to the School Maker Faire Organizer Network with direct chat and communication functions.
  • Subscription to Make: magazine, print (US only) and full digital archive.
  • Access to educator events, classes, kits, Make: magazine, and Make: books.
  • A monthly Maker Education newsletter.

If you have further questions about the School Maker Faire Program please reach out to makerfaire@make.co.

“We ran our first School Maker Faire and it was a hit! Student-focused, hands-on noisy, messy—just what we were hoping for! Thank you for sharing all of your organizational strategies. Our second annual School Maker Faire will be even better!”
NIS AMERICAN SCHOOL OF DUBAI

We Spent a Week with Carvey, Inventables' New 3D Carver, and We Don’t Want to Give it Back

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I’ve been eager to test out Carvey, Inventables’ new self-contained CNC router, since it launched on Kickstarter a few weeks ago. Inventables was also keen to see what Make: would do with this new 3D-carving machine (as they call it), so they sent us one of their prototypes to play with. And after a week with it, I’m being honest when I say I plan to do everything I can to not return it.Carvey_PoweredbyBadge_6

Carvey arrived the week of my son’s 6-month birthday, and I wanted to make a momento for the occasion — a wooden carving of his hospital certificate, done in a two-tone color scheme using a piece of ¾” wood I had painted blue.

I converted a scan of his certificate into an SVG vector file (using Adobe Illustrator) and imported it into Easel, Inventables’ free and incredibly easy to use CNC software, with which Carvey is designed to interface seamlessly. Set the depth for the carving, clamp the wood in place, tell the software what type of wood it is, what size bit you’re using, and click “carve” — it’s as simple as that, with the machine determining the necessary paths and speeds, spinning up, and creating your masterpiece. It’s advertised to be minutes to go from design to carving, and this integration is what really makes the Carvey experience so addictive.

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The most striking part about Carvey is its fully enclosed, sleek black design (created by MNML, the team that designed the XBox 360). The sealed workspace is a rarity with CNC machines, and is built to keep the noise low enough to have a phone conversation while carving in the same room. I can attest that this is indeed the case, especially with the 1/16” bits. The enclosure also holds in the chips and sawdust. Set in our work offices, there was never a mess, and the loudest noise of the process came from the vacuum we used to clean the inside of the machine when a carving was finished.

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Carvey has an 8×12-inch bed with a 2.75-inch Z-depth capability. It cuts material with a beefy 300 watt spindle. It automatically interfaces with Easel, and can also process Gcode from other software packages. Priced at $2000-$2400 on Kickstarter, the machine has a bigger platform at a lower price than the few other self-contained CNC machines that are available.

After my first carve, I made a few other pieces for home — including a fridge magnet of my son’s baby’s footprints, placing magnets into press-fit holes cut precisely on the back side of the carving. I made the Make: logo. And I have a carving going of Makey the Robot as I type this.

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I’ve also learned a very interesting tip about Easel and imported SVGs. When starting to use the software, you’ll likely initially set the depth of the carved elements within Easel — and it can support multiple depths, allowing for some interesting multi-level creations. But it will also set the depth of a design element in an SVG file based on its shade of gray. Pure black will be cut at 100% depth, pure white won’t be cut at all. If you want an intricate design to be partly cut at 50% depth and partly at 25% depth, pre-determining this is as simple as setting each area’s color in Illustrator before saving the SVG file — up to 255 levels of depth can be set this way.

And with this, you can create contoured carvings on Carvey using Easel. It’s not officially a feature that the company is supporting (they’re working on a more official process that will be released soon, one that hopefully imports STL files into Easel), but it works and has been giving us a lot of exciting ideas about new projects to do with the machine before we return it — if we do return it, that is. Let us know if there’s something you’d like us to make on it and we’ll update with the results.

The Kickstarter for Carvey finishes this Thursday. For schools, design shops, or hobbyists like myself, it’s a no-brainer.


Tumbleweed's Tips for Making Stained-Glass Art with the Dremel VersaTip

Dremel recently released the VersaTip and VersaFlame tools — butane-powered torches with interchangeable heating tips that allow for a variety of uses. The VersaTip comes in a small pencil-grip form that works well for soldering and intricate work; The VersaFlame is a slightly larger pistol-grip mini blowtorch that has targeted heating and soft-material cutting uses. Both excel for artists working with wood, leather, and more. Dremel_125x125_1

We connected with Beca Skeels, a talented artist who sells her creations as half of the Tumbleweeds Handmade duo, to learn how she’s been expanding into stained-glass art making with these tools. She’s shared her notes and tips with us.


As artists, (Tumbleweeds Handcraft partner) Doug and I work with a variety of mediums. Our primary material has been wood, and most specifically in the last few years, wood veneer for our sunglasses. Last year we started slowly expanding our catalog to camping tools, tiny knife and tool charms, apparel, home goods, and more — which has us working with a lot more metals, plus acrylic, bone, corian, antler, and copper.

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As we expand more in our work, I’ve also felt a natural progression in my personal art. As a maker, it’s easy to get stuck in the same cycle, make the things we know we’re good at, and rarely go outside our comfort zone. I’ve been challenging myself to learn a new craft and was instantly drawn to the art of stained glass. It definitely isn’t an easy craft, and more than any skill, it takes a lot of practice and patience.

I’ve done a fair amount of wood burning and the irons I’ve used in the past have always been clunky, the cord gets in the way and the handle is awkward, making it incredibly difficult to maneuver. I was hesitant to learn stained glass because of this. I’m excited to learn this new craft with the Dremel VersaTip because it is not only cordless, but holds like a pen and is much easier to get in smaller places with more precision.

Although the work I have done so far is incredibly elementary, its been such a fun learning process, full of mistakes! I spent a good hour one day breaking every single piece of glass I was attempting to cut because I was using the cutting tool upside down.

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned so far, both for using the VersaTip, and for making stained-glass art in general.

Beca’s VersaTip tips for beginner stained-glass artists:

• Make sure you keep a moist (natural, not synthetic) sponge handy and clean the tip often to keep the solder from building up. Since the VersaTip is built for precision, it’s important to keep the tip as clean as possible. Don’t ever use sandpaper to clean it. Keep it stored when it’s not in use because soldering tips can be effected by the elements.

• Use the temperature control option so that you’re in control of how hot the tip gets. When I first started out, I would just keep it on medium and not adjust it, but the more time I spend working with the tool, I have started adjusting the temperatures depending on the stage of soldering I am in. I think it’s really a personal preference.

• Hold the VersaTip at an angle, the same way you would hold a marker or pen. Use long, thoughtful movements while soldering to create a smooth seam. I still have a lot of learning in this department, but I have noticed that if I don’t rest my arm, and hover above the project, I have more control when it comes to soldering a seam.

• Start small. Try geometric pieces with short seams so that you can get the hang of working with the solder and comfortable with the iron before you move onto bigger pieces. We started by getting scrap stained glass from other artists, which can also be found online, and worked on geometric pieces with straight, clean lines.

• Precise and deliberate cuts of the glass, even foil creases, and steady seams of solder will make all the difference in learning this new craft.

• Although stained-glass art can be an expensive hobby, it doesn’t have to be! Use salvaged or repurposed glass, or check your local art co-op for scraps! And don’t forget to have a blast, there is nothing more rewarding than learning a new craft!

• Practice! I still have a LONG way to go in this journey, but having the right tools and the determination to make quality work means I know I’ll get better every time I practice.

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Beca Lewis Skeels and Doug Switalski are artists running the small variety shop Tumbleweeds Handcraft. They are currently based in the North Florida swamps. 


Can Teachers Build a Physics-Go-Round?

The Joy Wheel, at the now mostly defunct / relocated Playland at the Beach. Read on for a vivid, gorey memory of physics experiments by a San Francisco teen employee there decades ago. Photo courtesy of Mike Winslow's  Playland at the Beach

The Joy Wheel, at the now mostly defunct / relocated Playland at the Beach. Read on for a vivid, gorey memory from decades ago by a San Francisco then-teenaged employee. Flashback photo courtesy of Mike Winslow’s Playland at the Beach site.

How would you build a giant turntable or merry-go-round for the physics classroom? I was recently sent a discussion among teachers from the Exploratorium’s Teacher Institute on this very subject. It reminded me of the summer before my senior year of high school, when I took a physics class at Caltech with a juggling grad student who looked a lot like Jesus. Our best lesson of the summer? He took volunteers to a nearby park to see him and his pal juggle on a roundabout, and a few of us got to join him on the rotating platform. He gave us a playful metaphor to understand the alphabet soup of the calculus-rich vector exercises we did in the classroom.

Back to this teacher’s query. Ben posed the original challenge:

Our physics teacher and I have been fantasizing about having a large turntable on which students could explore a variety of concepts. Ideally we would like a surface around 3 or 4 meters in diameter that will stay flat, turn smoothly, support three or four high school students, and be sturdy enough to survive the wear and tear of years. Have any of you built a large turntable for class demonstrations? I would appreciate any plans, suggestions, or cautionary tales. It’s a long-term goal. We’ve been going round and round (so to speak) about size, materials, safety, bearing setups, used vs. new, placement etc.

Mandy suggested our oversized spin-art machine, but Ben needed something a bit slower. He defined it more clearly:

gyroscopes.org

Courtesy of gyroscopes.org

We want the students to study motion on a rotating surface, from various perspectives. I’d like to use it to demonstrate the Coriolis effect, for example.

We would like students to be able to sit on it, throw and roll balls between them, and film the ball’s motion from on, above, and beside the surface, both moving with the surface and not moving with it.

It needs to be strong enough to support them, and large enough to be able to observe the motion of objects moving above the surface for some distance.

Ellen Koivisto of Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco chimed in with a clever, STEAMy suggestion:

Talk to your theatre teacher/s and tech people. Turntables have become common set items again in recent decades (after Les Miserables). They were often built for Victorian melodramas, then fell out of favor with the rise of movies and kitchen sink naturalism.

I’m doing a show right now that uses a relatively small turntable — 11′-6″ in diameter. There are three concentric rings of casters that take the weight. I believe it’s two layers of 1/2″ ply, laid perpendicular to each other and glued together. One person can push it with their foot, or there are pole holes so a person can stick a metal pole into the hole and pull the turntable around. It moves smoothly and easily.

I did a show once with an 18′-diameter turntable. That required more people to move and bigger casters, but it was lovely to work on. I haven’t done a motorized turntable yet, but there’s tons of info on making and using them in technical theatre magazines and websites and books.

Caren Kershner similarly suggested checking in with the old Creede Repertoire Theatre in Creede, Colorado about how their three stages mounted on a turntable function.

While looking for images for this post, I found this detailed how-to on how Texas A&M’s Scene Shop built this rotating stage turntable for its production of Th3 B3ggar’s Op3ra.

Texas A&M's Scene Shop built this rotating stage turntable for its production of Th3 B3ggar’s Op3ra." Read more about how they built it here.

Texas A&M’s Scene Shop and its rotating stage turntable in progress.

Raleigh McLemore had lots of ideas:

Merry-go-round

Photo: wikipedia

My first thought was that you could build off of a platform like a playground merry-go-round. Some simple welding or carpentry might be all that it takes to either remove the uprights or add structure to them to build a platform that a student could safely stand on. You are working with bigger kids and some of the cheap (about $750) small structures may not have enough carrying capacity. Larger built spinning structures are heavy and expensive (around $2K). Outside chance your local parks department might have a broken one, or one that is in storage after a playground change up.

Another idea might be to start with a junkyard car wheel and wheel bearing. A front wheel kingpin might be pretty cheap and could be located vertically in a strong base with the wheel and bearing slipping over the kingpin to become a center to the car wheel spinning on it horizontally. Not sure how it would happen, but I’m sure the car wheel would be a very strong point to begin to weld or assemble a wooden structure upon. I haven’t thought it through very far but I would start with buying a wheel with a wheel bearing(s) and a kingpin if they were reasonably priced.

If a kingpin doesn’t seem right then I would look for an appropriately sized shaft to support the wheel and bearings. Perhaps even a hardwood axle could be fashioned although first thoughts seem to me that it wouldn’t be strong enough. Any upright axle that could be located into a solid plywood base would get you started. The junker car wheel bearing would fit upon the upright axle, the wheel would then be the spinning base of the structure. Done correctly you should have a stable spinning base. The platform couldn’t be too heavy or unbalanced, or it would wiggle and wobble. Putting additional support wheels around the outside of the large spinning platform might make the platform more level and add to stability.

Seems a bit elaborate, but I suppose you could use a dryer motor and belt to spin the wheel by mounting it on the plywood base at a distance to put tension on the horizontal spinning wheel using the dryer belt. You need guards and a speed control for this. What with the variable loads this could be a mess and deserves a lot of thought unless you can get the junk for free. Done poorly you could have a fire or a short.

Last, I wonder if you could hang something from a rafter/joist support (use rope? wire rope?) and put some good wheels around the outside of the platform so that the center is supported from a high point and the outside edges are held up by the wheels? This might be reasonably cheap if the overhead support is equal to the load. This might not be very smooth or stable for the experiments you have planned. Not sure how you would have a smooth controlled motion without a rail to guide the wheels. You wouldn’t have a clear center with this, the support rope popping out of the center of the platform.

Detail of a mural hanging at Playland Not at the Beach. Photo by Jef Poskanzer.

Detail of a mural hanging at Playland Not at the Beach. Photo by Jef Poskanzer.

Raleigh wrote again a little later to reminisce about his time working the Funhouse “Joy Wheel” at San Francisco’s old Playland at the Beach.

This thing was a very large flat, slick, spinning disk with about 20–25 folks climbing on, sitting as close to the center as they could squoosh. My job was to control the speed and spin the disk as fast as it needed to go to spin the folks off and have them slide hopefully to the padded wall and away from the spinning wooden platform. It was lots of fun until folks frantically grasped others and took off a large clump of people who slid off together. The resulting crush of humanity wouldn’t fly off of the disk completely and over and over again somebody would get jammed into the edge of the wheel, unable to move away due to the others being pushed against the wall. I had a “panic stop” button but it really didn’t stop the device very quickly when I hit it. Very gruesome injuries would sometimes occur, never life-threatening, but bloody. My job was to clean that up too.

When the midway had no customers, and I was free to move about the site freely, I used to roll stuff across the slick Joy Wheel surface, pour water at different places and occasionally even be able to anticipate where my experiments might exit the wheel. I remember thinking that somehow if I threw a dart in the air over the spinning disk the dart would begin to rotate with the spinning wheel before it hit…it is still surprising how much I want the disk to alter the trajectory of the dart, although I know it can’t.

From Raleigh’s description and the photo at the top of this post, I’m finding myself wishing there were a giant rotating disk in every city. It sounds like such fun! Except the bloody part. If you can’t quite make out the sign in the top of that picture, it reads “The best cure for blues is joy. Get cured here” (Also, who else thinks that might be Raleigh in the picture?)

We now turn to the Maker-verse. Have you built a large rotating disk? Can you share plans and tips for building it?