Flutterby™! : How Maker Faire is helping

Written in response to Mark VandeWettering's Maker Faire Post-Mortem:

Somewhere around a decade ago, Charlene and I looked at going to Burning Man again, sat back, and said "you know, what we really want to do is to bring that sense of building wacky stuff, of spontaneous pot-lucks, of adventures in surrealism, back into our own communities".

I went to Maker Faire once, and I may or may not go back if I end up with a project that'd be fun to show off there, but I think the value of it is that it gives us a place to go because "that's really cool" and helps us to make the transition to "let's make this really cool".

I have three plywood boat hulls in my back yard, left over from helping some high school students learn enough boatbuilding and woodworking hand-tools skills to compete in the Bodega Bay Fish Fest Wooden Boat Challenge, that we're going to assemble a bunch of kids together and decorate as art boats (and maybe turn two into a pedal powered boat) for the up-coming Rivertown Revival.

I spent last Friday night with a couple of middle schoolers filling balloons with hydrogen, made by mixing aluminum foil and muriatic acid (HCl), and exploding them.

I whipped up some cardstock with various size holes in them so that some acquaintances could view the eclipse safely, and this has turned in to a "wow, I need to see a pinhole camera happen!" project on the list.

I've been trying to help a bunch of kids learn fabrication and engineering by leading a 4H "junk drawer robotics" curriculum.

None of these things are really "Maker Faire worthy", but they're all part of what I think the Maker Faire inspires, and if by publicizing it I can get the kids who come to my junk drawer robotics night to start to think a little more scientifically, to graph out their marshmallow trebuchets with different weights and different configurations, and come to me with a plan for a trebuchet large enough to toss a pumpkin, then I think it's making a positive impact.

So, yeah: You may not have brought any cool hacks to Maker Faire, but you brought a telescope and the knowledge to project a solar image, and you brought the enthusiasm that helps show some of the younger attendees that "hey, this stuff is really cool!"

And all of those people turning the movement into a commercial opportunity? In a world where every toy is complete, where kids don't put their own stories on to corn husk or rag dolls, but are instead given "action figures" with back stories, where cheap plastic "swords" and "guns" replace sticks found in the forest, we need partial solutions to help wean kids back to disassembling those complete toys to see how they work, and building their own alternatives.

Yeah, it ain't perfect, but every step towards "how?" and "why?" and, perhaps more importantly, "what if?", is a step in the right direction.