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.
Here’s the full Miles O’Brien piece that aired tonight on PBS NewsHour. Really well-done, neat little package exploring the DIY/maker movement in general, the Maker Faires, the critical state of STEM education and making as a potential answer to that, and more. Follows the DeRose family and some high schoolers building projects for the Faire and then presenting them there. Good stuff.
The idea behind Volkswagen’s The Fun Theory program is simple: reward socially useful behaviors by making them into opportunities for play. Or, to quote a great sage, “You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.”
In this, the last installment of the third series of Bill Hammack’s wildly popular Engineer Guy videos, Bill exposes the wonders of fiber optics. He starts by demonstrating transmission of laser light through a fiber optic stereo cable, then explains total internal reflection with a really cool visual aid made from a bucket of antifreeze. There are details on the manufacture of the fibers themselves, the design of the first transatlantic fiber optic cable, and the signal processing used to encode data for transmission via fiber. All that, and more, in just five minutes and thirty seconds. Nice way to wound out series #3, Bill!
Houston, we have a … winner!
The UK’s Open University is starting a new course called TU100 My Digital Life based around the SenseBoard ubiquitous computing device and Sense programming environment, a derivative of the Scratch programming language developed at MIT Media Lab. [via /.]
Interesting idea from the UK’s Mindsets online. I haven’t found any pictures or video of the actual process or its products, so it may be one of those many brainstorms that turns out to be, ah, well…let’s just say “more interesting as an idea than in practice.” Still, I am intrigued.
Due to my excitement about using the Arduino hardware Accessory Development Kit (ADK) that Google gave me, I’m diving into Android development for the first time. Mind you, I’m not a programmer. I have experience developing MEL scripts for Maya (CG animation software) and Arduino coding, but these are both simpler environments than the full-blown […]
