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.
Just last week we mentioned the OpenPCR project and included a link to their Kickstarter page. Throughout the week support for the project poured in from all over the Internet and eventually the project surpassed their initial target. Then on Friday the project hit a snag. The heated lid that warms the top of the tubes kept burning out. That’s when Tito Jankowski decided to post a question soliciting feedback on O’Reilly Answers.
Reinventing Edison: Build Your Own Lightbulb Kit is a fun science kit designed to excite and engage experimenters of all ages as they recreate the experiments that lead to the development of the first real light bulb. Build your own working light bulb using the included safety vacuum chamber and a number of different filament materials including carbon and tungsten.
We sent David Veloz, Jr., a Navy engineer at Port Hueneme, 29 copies of MAKE a few months back. He volunteers as a facilitator for a high school outreach program for students with an interest in science and engineering. Here’s his note back with a great pic of the students holding MAKE Volume 19.
Top 10 mechanical curiosities from the archives of Make: Online.
MAKE Editor at Large David Pescovitz gave this wonderful talk at TEDxSoMA on “The world as a wunderkammer” (aka “cabinet of curiosities”). Hey, Mousey the Junkbot even makes a guest appearance. Woot! Pesco’s talk from TEDxSoMa: The World as a Wunderkammer From MAKE magazine: Check out MAKE, Volume 17: The Lost Knowledge issue! Buy your […]
Rachel sent me this link to an easy tutorial on building your own wall-sized abacus by Stephanie Lynn. I’m pretty sure I’ll never need an abacus, but I gotta admit it looks like fun to build one. It would appear Stephanie is making the beads by cutting slices out of a closet rod and then drilling a hole in the center of each–I say save a step and use a hole-saw for both operations! [via Ohdeedoh]
In the late 19th century, when biologists and botanists from Harvard were sailing all over the world taking specimens of every living creature they could find and sending them back home for study, a very serious problem arose in the accurate preservation of those specimens. There was no refrigeration and no practical color photography, and fresh plant and animal specimens rapidly decayed into colorless blobs of mush in jars full of alcohol or formalin. So then-director of the Harvard Botanical museum George L. Goodale commissioned German father-and-son glass artists Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka to create photorealistic replicas of fresh specimens in solid glass. The Blaschkas would go on to spend the next 50 years creating more than 3,000 such models, which are still on display at Harvard today. It’s a thing not to be missed in your time on this Earth.
