Meet the Award Winners

Maker News
AMA Live Showcase

By Dale Dougherty

Dale Dougherty

DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

View more articles by Dale Dougherty

Meet the winners of this year’s Amazing Maker Awards. Our top winners came from the US and Canada, Turkey, Japan, and Germany and they are as young as 14. Their projects represent social impact, art, technical achievement and education. This is an audio recording of our October 4 Live Showcase in which I talked to our top winners about their projects.

Here are the winners that are featured in the podcast:

  • Noelle Connover, Matt’s Maker Space
  • Daniel Springwald, Tesla Animatronic Bust
  • Caleb Kraft, Make Editor (not an award winner)
  • Selin Alara Ornek, IC4U3 robotic dog for the sight impaired
  • Caleb Kodoma, Coded Breath using machine learning to detect fungal pneumonia
  • Kenzie Housegos, Artistic Exploration of Online Courtship
  • Shingo Hisakawa, qNinja PCR machine

Top Prize Winner

Christina Ernst, She Builds Robots