Tactile Deep-Space Imagery For The Visually Impaired
NASA’s Amazing Space project has a monthly Tactile Astronomy feature that provides public-domain files for printing “feelable” versions of Hubble’s deep space photographs on special printers:
Education
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.
Make: Electronics Components Pack 1
The Make: Electronics Components Pack 1 includes all the parts you need to perform experiments 1-11 from our incredibly popular Make: Electronics book by Charles Platt.
Wave Machine From Tape, Toothpicks, and Gummy Bears
What I look for in a project, more than any other single quality, is doing a lot with a little. This “wave machine” demo from the UK’s National STEM Centre, targeted to science teachers for classroom use, is a great example. It’s just duct tape, wooden skewers, and gummy bears, but it creates some really striking, beautiful effects when set in motion. I want to make one in my living room just to play with. Their licensing terms forbid embedding of the video, but it’ll be worth your click to hop on over to STEM and watch it move.
ThinkGeek Giving Away Damaged Stock to Hackerspaces, Schools
How cool is that? From Blurgh! The ThinkGeek Blog:
We have a problem. And it’s growing at a rate proportional to our return pile. We can’t, in good conscience, resell damaged electronics. And we can’t donate them to charity–the saddest kid in the world is one with a handheld video game that won’t turn on. Garbage, then? Not good for the environment. Luckily for us, there’s an entire class of scavengers out there ready to pick the bones of our helicopters, keyboards, and interactive t-shirts: hackers, makers, and crafty techy types.
They’re even polling interest in a possible subscription service. [Thanks, John!]
Skill Set: The Beginning (Mechanical) Engineer’s Checklist
A while ago MAKE did a post on A Beginning Engineer’s Checklist from the PIClist site. And while I love these kind of lists, it left me – as a mechanical engineering – feeling a little left out, with all the talk of chips and Ohm’s Law and power busses (oh my!). It also reminded […]
Simple Hele-Shaw Flow Demo Produces Beautiful Organic Forms
Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool, this cool vid from Jessica Rosenkrantz featuring a simple Hele-Shaw cell, which, per Wikipedia, demonstrates “Stokes Flow between two parallel flat plates separated by an infinitesimally small gap.” Further, “[v]arious problems in fluid mechanics can be approximated to Hele-Shaw flows and thus the research of these flows is of importance.”
New in the Maker Shed: Mintronics – MintDuino
The MintDuino is perfect for anyone interested in learning (or teaching) the fundamentals of how micro controllers work.