For questions about the Michigan Makers projects, email faculty advisor Kristin Fontichiaro at font [at] umich [dot] edu.
Thanks for a great year!
Kristin
We had a wonderful time with Mrs. Goldberg and the Michigan Makers at East this year. For the 2013 - 2014 school year, we are no longer at East but working with kids at Mitchell and at YCS Middle School.
For questions about the Michigan Makers projects, email faculty advisor Kristin Fontichiaro at font [at] umich [dot] edu. Thanks for a great year! Kristin It's hard to believe that it's April 17, and this is our last day with our U-M mentors. Some of them are getting ready to graduate, and all of them are preparing their final projects and presentations. To celebrate the end of a jam-packed year of learning and making, we're hosting a celebration today. Families, district leaders, and some U-M friends will be joining us as each of us (mentors, too!) shows off something he or she is proud to have made this year, either at home or at Michigan Makers. I won't spill the beans, but I can say that here are some of the things piled up on my desk or in my car to bring out to East today: play dough, photos, manuscripts, a mystery box, something we never quite got to work, and a camera. Last week, everyone was working hard to get something ready to share. We had so much fun seeing you guys at work. There was an amazing productive vibe in the room, and we realized how much everyone had learned about focus, applying their skills, and working with peers. We hope to see you there. If you can't make it, check out our Flickr feed in a few days to see what you missed, or take a look at the video below to catch a glimpse of what we worked on first semester! - Kristin We had another busy day of Michigan Makers! Sewing machines were whirring, kids were coding with Scratch, we unpacked our new monitors and faced weird new challenges with Raspberry Pi, and a student video crew gathered footage for an upcoming project! The Michigan Makers tackling sewing had a lot of questions about how sewing machines work. UMSI mentor Kelsey found a cool video that shows how stitches are made. Check it out below! We were glad to have Maya's dad, Mr. M., helping out again, this time with formatting a Raspberry Pi and assembling it. It is an awesome feeling to see the big raspberry icon on your screen, because it means you did it -- and it takes most of the 90 minutes to do it! Do you know why Raspberry Pis have green circuit boards? What it means when your Raspberry Pi boots up and shows you a # sign and not a $ sign or a desktop? Ask Mr. M.! We also took a mockup of the Fall 2013 book Raspberry Pi for a test drive ... hmmm ... we think we found a mistake in it. Good thing we can catch that before it goes to print! We added the photo below to our Flickr photo stream. Want to see what else Michigan Makers were working on today? You'll have to wait for the video team to work its magic! - Kristin Have you ever wondered why Mrs. Goldberg wanted Michigan Makers to get started? Hop over to the web version of Young Adult Library Services magazine to read her article! The article also includes a version of our Follett Challenge video. Haven't seen it? Click below! Congratulations, Mrs. G! - Kristin Special shout-out to our new grad student mentor, Kelsey, who jumped right into her first day by helping with this activity!
Our first day of sewing was a huge success! The day was a bit more structured than some of the other activities we've been doing, in order to make sure the makers understand both the safety measures necessary and the operational basics for using our sewing machines. We started out with a threading demonstration, and then the makers worked in pairs to thread the rest of the machines. This buddy system worked well throughout the day-- an extra pair of eyes watching that needle never hurts! After another brief demonstration of how to actually use the machines, the makers took turns practicing on some scrap material. Favorite feature so far: the reverse function. Then it was time for the makers to think about their first project: a pillow in a shape of their choosing, but with a few specific elements included: a straight line, a curve, and an angle. Most of the kids incorporated these elements into the outside shape of their pillows, but Vincent is making a rectangular pillow and using the machine to create a curvy, embroidered design on the front side. We got as far as patterns and pinning, and hope to finish up by the end of next week's meeting. It was fascinating to watch how quickly the makers took to these machines. Within a matter of minutes, the kids quickly figured out how much pressure to apply to the foot pedals, how to use their hands to guide, not pull, the fabric through, and what "bad" pulling felt like if the thread knotted up. Everyone got a turn at the machines, with their partners (and Kelsey and I) watching closely to monitor things like hand placement, speed, and needle and presser foot starting position. The makers showed that they understand the safety concerns of the sewing machines and take them just as seriously as we do. We're excited to see how everyone's projects turn out next week, and to start exploring other projects to make with these machines! -Jessica
Activities at Michigan Makers this week:
Shout-Outs!
Come back again soon to see what's happening and what's new at Michigan Makers! --Ellen Can you tell it is spring break and the Michigan Makers are catching up? We have a lot of people who are asking about the photos we take in our makerspace, so we've started a Flickr account so you can download the photos and video you like best. Check out the slideshow of video and photos below or visit the Flickr account here. - Kristin Hi, everyone! The last time we met, we finally got to fire up the Raspberry Pi computers! The fun part about Raspberry Pi is that you do all the work to put it together. You download the operating system, put the pieces together, and go from a pile of components into a functional computer! If you want to try this at home, we used BerryBoot to get started. We also got to test-drive the forthcoming Raspberry Pi book ... stay tuned ... we have news about that, too, for when we see you next! - Kristin Hi, Michigan Makers! It's been a while since we've seen you. First you had winter break, then we had a snow day, and this week, the UM team is on winter break! What did you do over spring break? Maya and her dad hung out at Dearborn's Tech Shop and laser-cut cases for our Raspberry Pis. Check out the video below. Eventually, we can peel off the protective brown paper to reveal clear acrylic underneath. We can't wait to see you again on the 13th. Wait until you see what new equipment we'll be unveiling! It's not what you might expect ... - Kristin Arduino (pronounced Ar-dwee-no) is the name of a tiny micro-controller that allows people to become more comfortable with basic computer programming and hardware. For our last Michigan Makers workshop of the Fall 2012 semester, the Michigan Makers group worked with these awesome gadgets for the first time. Arduino is great because it's simple enough that East's sixth graders can grasp the basics, but it is also flexible and powerful enough to be used by professional programmers, designers, and robotics technicians. For this first Arduino lesson, we introduced the hardware—the Arduino looks like a circuit board about the size of a deck of cards. The students recounted what they knew about circuits, conductors, and resistance, which they learned about in our Squishy Circuits workshop earlier in the year. Over half the group was able to raise their hands and build off of others' contributions, showing me they already knew a good deal about how electricity moves and works. This knowledge would soon help them to make sense of why they needed to give the electricity someplace to flow through and to. After talking a bit more about what people use Arduino for, including the Peruvian boy who set up an automated earthquake alarm system, we set the kids to attempting to unpack what swatches of code are designed to do. Working in pairs and always building off of each other's thoughts and ideas, they tried to make sense out the previously forbidden territory of computer code. The students uploaded a program that controlled when an LED light bulb, or light bulbs, blinked. They then altered the code so that the lights blinked at different times. Twenty minutes after looking at it for the first time, they were already controlling both the code and a strange, light emitting machine! Our last challenge was for the pairs of students to cut and paste a chunk of code from the internet into the code that they had been working with. This was bit a tougher, because the students had to pay close attention to how the code fit together to make the lights blink. After we finished, the students excitedly shared with others what they'd learned. It was particularly exciting to feel like they were coding and using a robot—something they hadn't considered possible before. The lesson was successful partly because we have a great place to work in at the school's library, partly because the Arduino is such cool technology, but especially because of our big kid coaches, the ninth graders that are expert in Arduino and were so great at helping troubleshoot, help kids understand things, and even bringing in their own Arduino projects to show off. It is incredible to see all of the kids get so excited about this technology, because there are so many possibilities for applying the knowledge they are building. These upcoming weeks, we'll introduce Arduino to the other half of the group, but we'll also give the students more time to work, incorporating sensors, buzzers, and more cool stuff for our young Makers to control. -Terence |
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