makezine.com: The great city of Pittsburgh is gearing up to host the sixth annual Maker Faire Pittsburgh this weekend, on October 14 and 15, at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, an institution who has been leading the charge in promoting hands-on STEAM education for kids. Last year, the Faire, which is free to the public, hosted 206 makers and roughly 8,200 attendees. This year, 250 makers of diverse backgrounds and areas of interest are preparing to share what they make with the community.
9 comments:
Sydney, Joss, and I went to the Maker Faire today! It totally lived up to my expectations. We ended up arriving around noon, so we had less time with all the exhibits, which was kind of sad. If I did not have homework that had to get done, I would go back again tomorrow. I was immediately drawn to the Heavy Meta Art Car. It truly is a beautiful piece of technology – if that's even a good way to put it. You can feel the heat of the fire ball it shoots out of its mouth from 50ft away. It also shoots fire up from its tail. I think it is so cool that there are co-op groups that get together and build cool stuff like this just for the fun of it, because this van truly is spectacular.
This article did not even mention the Power Racers. Groups from colleges and maker spaces all over the country take the plastic framed, motorized car toys that little kids drive around neighborhoods and backyards, and soup them up to be super speedy go-carts. They get audience involved in voting for the coolest looking car (I got to be a judge for this Moxie Event). They then go a races around the track, and the cars are tracked and points are tallied and at the end of the Power Racer tour, there is an overall winner crowned. It was so thrilling seeing these cars zoom around the hay bale framed track outside of the Children's Museum. Building a race car like a Power Racer now seems like a really enticing summer project.
Like I have said before, I love how Maker Faires get the community interacting with and thinking about the mesh of art and science and math and innovation. I felt like a kid again getting to see all the cool booth and participate in all the hands-on activities. This event was awesome to go to, and if you happen to have your Sunday free, I would totally recommend going. If not, go next year – I know I will!
I went to the maker faire today and to be honest I was a little disappointed. I think it would be a great place to bring a kid to, and it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as interesting as maker faires I’ve been to in the past. A lot of the booths seemed to be along the lines of “look at this stuff we made with a laser cutter” and a handful of “look at this stuff we made with a 3D printer.” And while a lot of that stuff was really cool, it wasn’t anything that I was exceptionally impressed or inspired by. However, I’m a 20 year old who is majoring in Technical Direction and has a fair amount of exposure to things like laser cutters and 3D printers. I don’t think I was the target demographic, so I don’t think the fact I wasn’t particularly interested is even relevant. I think an elementary or middle schooler could’ve been really inspired by a lot of the things there. I saw the robot petting zoo this article mentioned, the robots were made of cardboad with fairly simple motors and sensors and programmed with Scratch to react when you fed them little pieces of paper. It was super cute and I’m sure the kids had a lot of fun making them, and many of them will probably continue to be interested in robotics and programming because of it.
JinAh, Kyrie, and I went to the Maker's Faire yesterday, and it seemed like it had a lot of potential, and was a great event for kids. The vendors were all very interesting, but prices were a little bit too high-especially for the jewelry. There was a lot of innovative stuff- a lot of the earrings were laser cut or we even stumbled across a maker who created their earrings and necklaces out of concrete or colored glass applied to concrete. Listening to each vendor talk briefly about their process (a nice way to do a sales pitch I might add) was definitely worth the trip, as was the fire breathing dragon and the music that was generated by probes being placed on a plant, and the plant's activity in turn produced sound. The point of this event seemed to be very family friendly-most of the booths had swarms of kids around them, and it seemed like a great opportunity for makers and inventors to connect with the greater Pittsburgh community as well as each other.
This is something that I am hoping to be able to go to this coming weekend. I greatly enjoy seeing the creativity and connections that people make when going to events like this. The expansion of STEM to STEAM in terms of education this way I think allows people to make connections and ideas that they would have otherwise not thought of. Looking at it from a theatrical point of view, getting to see how and what others have done both in traditional and non-traditional ways is always eye-opening, to say the least. I have never walked away from one of these events have not learned something or had a wonderful conversation with a maker. I just came from a school which was beginning to push for a STEAM system and one of the major things we told the advisors to go and see were events like this. This it learning for all, with a little fun on the side.
Super sad I’m still pretty sick and couldn’t make it down to the Maker’s Faire this weekend, but from everyone else’s comments it seems like something that may have not been worth the trip on a busy Saturday in the North Shore. I definitely see the appeal of going and talking to the vendors about their processes and production quality and how they came to be, and I definitely wanted to see the metal dragon shoot some fireballs, but maybe I can go next year. I definitely would have loved to go to something like this as a kid, and I hope the exhibits and activities do a great job of explaining to all of the kids just how technology in crafting can be just as important as technology in other fields. One of the reasons I love being a technical director is that I still get to use my math-y science-y side while also getting to work with creative teams and think of interesting solutions myself, and I hope all the kids this weekend see that.
When I heard about this event, all I thought of at first were the the little craft fairs that my hometown holds each year. Normally church-funded they are relatively small gatherings of local vendors who make trinkets and baubles from home to bring to their little tables for sale. I assumed that the Pittsburgh Maker Faire would be a little more robust with actual professionals and a larger turnout corresponding with its population but I had no idea it would be such an enormous event. I also did not know that some of its vendors would be as far reaching as Canada. The effort to ground the event in education with the Children's Museum is another brilliant way to make the event more accessible to attendees and future generations of attendees. All the work presented looks engaging, creative, and a blast to be a part of. I am thoroughly disappointed that I won't be able to go this weekend because of my workload but I am happy to have read this article and seen some of the beautiful things that will be presented there.
I went to the Maker Faire yesterday with Katie and Joss. The event was definitely geared more towards young children. There were a ton of maker-themed events geared towards introducing young children to STEM fields. But outside of the vendors selling jewelry and clothing, there were few interactive art/design/performance activities. The circus arts workshops seemed to be the only all-inclusive interactive events. The hand building clay workshop was limited to 15 people, a number wildly disproportionate to the amount of people at the fair, and the pottery wheel demonstration was non-interactive, so we saw many children get bored quickly and leave the demonstration. The fair definitely could have done more children in the maker workshops. One problem was that the maker space in the Children's Museum was too small to accommodate the amount of people at the event. They could have moved the maker space to the park outside the museum. The art/design portion of the fair seemed underdeveloped in comparison with the STEM portion of the fair.
I am surprised the article did not mention the Power Racing series. The Power Racing track seemed to be the largest event at the fair, though that might have just been because the track took up the most space and was at the center of the fair. The power racing vehicles were the most whimsical "cars" I have ever seen, and I have passed both the Oscar Meyer Weiner Mobile and the Mr. Peanut NutMobile on the interstate. They just looked like they had been fun to build. If I had the time, I would definitely take a summer and build one. Going to the maker faire made me feel like a child again, so I would say that the day trip to the north shore was worth it. And I got to witness Katies eating her first funnel cake.
I won't lie I when I read the headline of robotic petting zoo I kinda got really excited to see where it was and what it would entail. I am happy as hell that it was at the Pittsburgh makers faire this weekend but also sad cause I am not in town. Makers fairies have always interested me do to the just shear amount of crazy awesome things people are working on with the usage of both high tech and low tech fabrication. While I really wish to be able to attend a maker faire in the future, just reading about the different exhibits that are on display at the faire has always made me really interested and fascinated cause often I just go to myself I wish I would of thought of something that cool, but eh maybe in the future I wil. All in all makers faire are weird and awesome I just need to get to one now.
I was unfortunately unable to go to the Maker Fair in Pittsburgh, but it seemed like a success. It sounds like it was a highly interactive experience, especially for children, which is exceedingly important because of the growing need for developers and creative inventors in our world. I found it really interesting the way the kids were able to collaborate to make interactive installations. The Cerebral Concepts team’s work has some of my favorite photographs, and discovering the link between creativity and technology is something I’ve always been interested. I have a lot of respect for those in technological fields who always look to maintain the integrity of the principals of design in their developments and pay a lot of attention to the aesthetic of their final product. I was amazed by the intricacy of James Gyre’s naked geometry. The presence of mathematics in art has always inspired me, and his work was really well done and organic.
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