Next month’s Maker Faire Bay Area is our biggest event of the year. It’s held at the San Mateo County Event Center. But this past weekend here in Sonoma County, Calif. where MAKE is headquartered, us North Bay folks flocked to the Sonoma County Maker Kids Mini Maker Faire. It was a good day of kid-friendly projects and a warm-up of sorts for the main event to come next. Have a look.
There are a million fun things you can do with a toilet paper roll. Here’s a great idea I haven’t seen before: Make them into superhero cuffs! Check out Rachael Rabbit’s tutorial — if you want to get that fabulous glitter look, you actually need to take precautions so the toilet paper tube retains its shape and doesn’t go all floppy from the glue.
Looking for a simple yet fun kit to get youngsters into making? Check out the Make: SpinBot Kit from the Maker Shed. This kit lets them create a simple, vibrating “robot” that makes unique works of art.
Let neighbor kids know when your little ones are ready for hangouts with this double-sided front porch “let’s play” sign!
Twelve-year-old Maker Quin already has a company of his own–Qtechknow. He founded a hackerspace in his garage on California’s Central Coast. He helps teach Arduino classes for kids and adults. And he developed the “gas cap” a baseball hat that detects human methane emissions. (What 12-year-old woulnd’t want that?) And now he’s created the FuzzBot, a cool little robot that not only turns on a dime to avoid obstacles, it helps his mom out by dragging a dust cloth as it makes its rounds.
The Hello World Program would like to invite you to a Robot Puppet Party at the Maker Faire Bay Area next month. Hello World has been running for about a year, building a library of video tutorials on a variety of open source tech topics, narrated by handmade puppets. Guido the Python teaches the Python programming language, of course, while the robot Unique ID discusses robotics, circuitry and the basics of object-oriented programming. Currently under construction is a new fox puppet who will be in charge of HTML tutorials.
Over the next two weekends we have the final set of events in our series of regional Young Maker/Open Makes in the San Francisco Bay Area leading up to Maker Faire Bay Area. At last, this month the two public events are on different Saturdays, so you can go to both! Each event offers a range of activities that starts at 10am and ends with an inspiring “meet-the-makers” panel discussion.
