Our first Maker Faire will involve three schools. It is our attempt to bring together junior students from three schools along with a very innovative group of people interested in makerspaces.  We have never done this before, but the learning and collaboration will be great.

One of the great things about this project is that we have the assistance of a number of student teachers who are doing an amazing job of putting all this together.  From contacting resource people to take on demonstrations and workshops to organizing our grade 6 students to host the event, these students are pretty much doing everything.

The schedule calls for students around 10:00 to start off with some ice-breakers – the mix of students will be really interesting – one of the schools is coming from the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation.  The University of Ottawa, a major partner in this project works closely with this school.  This should be the beginning of a very interesting partnership between our three schools.

We are asking our partners in this venture to supply demonstrations and workshops for the students.   Presenters will be asked to demonstrate the use of a piece of technology (i.e. 3D printer, Makey Makey, etc.) or prepare a very short interactive activity related to the chosen piece of technology. Activities should be no longer than 10 minutes and should be able to be carried out either on the table or on the floor close to the table. The demo booths should be able to accommodate 3 to 5 students. Clean up and preparation time should be minimal in order to prepare for the next group of students who will visit the demo booth.Demonstrations could include:

• a Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server ; a Virtual Reality headset that at the same time shows the inside of the Minecraft world or some other virtual world concurrently with the Raspberry Pi server.
• a 3D scanner to scan busts of the kids and create a file that can be 3D printed or modified using 3D modelling software (eg. add cat ears, or pointy vulcan ears, long witch nose, etc.) 3D scan
• playdoh creations that could then be 3D printed in plastic.
• 3D image can also be
• Use of a makey-makey as an interface to a Game or music program in processing.
• a demo of programming in Scratch.
• Run Scratch and Arduino/makey-makey demo in standalone instance on laptop or Raspberry Pi.

All of this has been suggested by just one member of our creative team!

Demonstrations would be followed by workshops that would be at least one hour in length.  This would give the students an opportunity to explore some aspect of maker culture in more depth.  For the workshops, the presenter will be asked to run the same activity station twice during the Maker Faire (11:15-12:15 and 12:50-1:50). Of the five activity stations to be scheduled, the students will have the option of choosing two. The student’s selections and the rotation schedule will be prepared prior to the actual event day. The activity stations will need to accommodate between 12 and 15 students.

Possible workshops include computer deconstruction, work with LittleBits, run by students, LED paper airplanes and robot building.

We still have a few weeks to put this all together, but this promises to be a really wonderful experience for everyone!

could we see these at our Maker Faire??