Tips, Tricks, & Ideas: Our Wall of Materials

Our wall of materials gets photographed pretty frequently by visitors who want to know what we keep on-hand for our making, so I thought I’d share it with all of you. We store most of our materials in clear, plastic bins. These are color-coded by general making activity, and age range. Materials like white glue get stored…

Kinder Programmers

Our kindergarteners are some of our biggest makers at Lighthouse. They make year-round, usually with sewing and woodworking (using handsaws, clamps, drills, and hammers). Now, they are in their second week of testing out a programming unit, and so far it looks like it’s going pretty well. You may recall my Turtle Art posts from several months back. This new…

Tips, Tricks, & Ideas: Bandage Scissors

Someone (I don’t remember who—sorry!) recently gave us this nifty piece of advice, and I’d like to pass it on to all of you: bandage/medical scissors work really well for cutting cardboard. We used them for our marble maze and cardboard hands at Maker Faire, and they were great. I also tested them on Popsicle…

Lighthouse @ Maker Faire 2015

Maker Faire came and went. It took months of planning—an entire year, for those of us who began thinking about it at the close of last year’s faire (which does not include me)—scheduling, rescheduling, last minute panics, and many headaches. But it came together really nicely in the end. How would you describe Maker Faire?…

Countdown to Maker Faire: 9 Days

Project: Van de Graaf Generator Makers: Gilberto C., Arya B., Martin R. At least from my perspective, this is one of the bigger and more complex of our student projects being worked on this year for Maker Faire. A Van de Graaf generator is a machine that builds up an electric charge inside of a metal…

Countdown to Maker Faire: 10 Days

Maker Faire prep is coming along. While the Creativity Lab staff is hard at work getting t-shirts ordered and schedules planned (and more—trust me, there’s quite a bit of work involved), students are working to get their projects wrapped up. I’m dedicating the next few weeks to previewing some of the projects that students will be showing…

Making Hands

We are all focused on getting ready for Maker Faire right now, which has kept me busy and gotten me behind on this post. Next week I’ll begin posting previews of students’ projects for Maker Faire, but, while it’s still fresh, I thought I’d share a making project that our middle school students just finished in their making elective, since…

Testing out 3D Printed Scribblers

In the weeks to come, we are focusing on Maker Faire prep, but I’m also working on an updated project guide for scribble machines. It would be nice if I could fit this project guide to the template I just created for Turtle Art, but we’re talking about two very different kinds of projects. The Turtle Art project guide…