Maker Faire is the Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth — a family-friendly festival of invention, creativity, and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the maker movement.
Part science fair, part county fair, and part something entirely new, Maker Faire is an all-ages gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, engineers, science clubs, authors, artists, students, and commercial exhibitors. All of these people come to Maker Faire to show what they have made and to share what they have learned.
Explore below to see the best of Maker Faire, and head to makerfaire.com for more information.
Artist Benjamin Carpenter explores interactions between systems in his mechanical kinetic sculpture “Higher”. At Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 he demonstrates the work, consisting of 3 vertically oscillating eyeballs atop springs. The movement is controlled by a single button the user presses which activates the piece’s mechanism.
Recently, I’ve had a chance to meet up with some of the people active in MakeIt Labs in Nashua, NH. This relatively new hackerspace was created a bit more than a year ago, and has undergone some happy changes. Over the summer, I carved out a bit of time to visit their new digs while at a three day workshop for teachers at UMass Lowell.
It’s been exciting to meet members of MakeIt Labs at the Cambridge and Rhode Island Mini Maker Faires, and see their projects shared with people at World Maker Faire where I chose them for an Editors’ Choice award.
With over 200,000 views, Hayden Parker’s YouTube channel has become a popular spot for watching home chemistry demonstrations. Hayden took his show on the road to Maker Faire Bay Area 2011, where he set up a basic chemistry lab, teaching the science of chemistry and wowing passerby with seemingly magic color-changing chemical reactions.
The Bay Area Lego Users Group builds creations of every size and type imaginable, exclusively using Lego blocks. From entire neighborhoods of buildings, to a scale reproduction of the battleship Yamato, they had plenty on hand to show at Maker Faire Bay Area 2011. At their meetings they often have competitions to test their building prowess, in events such as coaster cars and structural stability on their very own “earthquake table.”
SpaceCamps have been happening at Maker Faire Bay Area, Detroit, and New York. The point of SpaceCamp is to propagate the robustness and awareness of hacker- and makerspaces. Attending spaces are curated into a shared area so that space facilitators get to know each other and Faire attendees are exposed to the wide variety of spaces’ interests, personalities, and geographies.
At this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area, there were robots of all kinds! Enjoy a few snapshots of our robotic friends, taken by Gregory Hayes.
Set TiVos on Record! Just an FYI that we got word today that there will (likely) be a segment about World Maker Faire on ABC News NOW, in Daniel Sieberg’s “Tech This Out” segment. The show airs at 12:30pm. If you miss it on the Tube, it will be up on the series of tubes later, via Tech This Out’s Hulu page.
