1000 batteries? Check! 1,000 cut cardstock templates? Check. Thousands of paper figures, rolls of conductive tape, and a thousand LED’s? Check, check, and check! All systems go for our hands-on pop-up card activity for Portland’s Maker Faire. Good thing, since we were nothing but swamped from the moment the Faire opened it’s gates. Continue reading
In the last few days before the Portland Maker Faire, our young makers did their part to share the news of this exciting event with our community. Wednesday morning, Vanessa, Aislinn, and Annika got up at 3:30 in the morning to participate in KGW’s morning show. Continue reading
Our new logo is inspired, and so are we! We wanted something that would speak to our focus on soft circuits while also recognizing hardware and software as well as young makers of either gender. My imagination failed me, but our creative friend Nathan from positive6 did not!
This logo took a circuit-card background and turned it into a fabric, then added thread and lights.
Next up – young maker-designed logos, printable iron-on transfers, and T-shirts!
The much-anticipated Portland mini Maker Faire is nearly here and we are gearing up! Since this faire is in our own back yard, we are going beyond our usual presentation to offer local makers a chance to play around with the high/low tech Making we enjoy. Continue reading
Welcome back to the new season of PDX Young Makers and to our new web site. As a result of irreconcilable differences with GoDaddy hosting services, we have moved to Dreamhost and a WordPress blogging format to kick off our second year. Apologies for downtime, lost photo galleries, and incoveniences – we will be working on bringing everything back up to snuff soon.
A small mini maker faire was held this summer as part of the annual Open Source Conference, here in Portland, and we were invited to participate. We had an amazing opportunity to meet with local makers (we particularly enjoyed the coffee-can robots!!) and to share our projects. It turned out that we were right next to Greenlight for Girls, where 30 young women participated in projects involving robots and space and other cool things. Our young makers were curious about their work, and they were equally interested in ours – truly a nice exchange of experiences and ideas. Continue reading
Anna and Annika travelled to Seattle this summer to participate in the mini Maker Faire at the S
eattle Center. This was a very different experience than the big Maker Faire in San Mateo – more intimate, more accessible, less overwhelming, but just as inspiring. The girls brought the really wonderful wearables (dresses, t-shirts, bags) that they had made over the previous season. They received a lot of attention and interest from folks who were impressed with their making and/or interested in the appeal that electronics held for girls when it was directed towards fashion.
Most importantly, they had a lot of fun and enjoyed the hands-on activities at a lot of the other maker booths.
Maker Faire is no doubt one of the most inspiring events possible for a young maker. There is the opportunity to see the unbelievable variety of Making that is going on – from rockets to robots, from fire and water scupltures to milk-container igloos, from sewing to soldering – and to participate hands-on at the multitude of booths featuring small projects. Unfortunately, San Mateo is a little far for Portland families to trek – and to make things worse, three of our dancers had recital the same weekend – so Annika was our sole representative at the 2012 Faire (she flew back Saturday night, having missed the dress rehearsal but ready to go on stage for the recital on Sunday.) Continue reading
Three of our young makers attend a dance studio that performs at half-time for a Blazer’s basketball game every year. The girls were asked to wear black and sparkles and left to be creative from there on. All three girls created something a little different and amazed their fellow performers with their electrically charged costumes!
In January I had the opportunity to bring the pop-up LED card activity to the Design, Make, Play conference at the New York Hall of Science. The conference brought together technologists, makers, learning science researchers, educators, and more to brainstorm about how the maker movement could catalyze innovation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Continue reading
