Maker Meet-Up

Towson University's 3D Printer

On Wednesday, November 28th I attended a statewide Maker Meet-Up at the West County branch of the Anne Arundel County Public Library. There is actually a ton of information and resources available to you if you click on the Maker Meet-Up link. There is also a Flickr (online photo album) of the event. You can also read the news article about the event.

With that said, I'll focus mostly on my personal take-aways and ideas I got relative to staff development in western Maryland.

I attended the event wearing two hats: 1) my "I-wanna-be-a-maker" human hat and 2) my staff development coordinator hat. Basically, I needed to reconcile the fact that I personally know very little about the maker revolution with the fact that I need to be able to take bits and pieces of it back to my colleagues in the western MD region. It turned out to be the perfect event to do just that. 

So, how did I do this? Well, the event kicked off with a round of lightning talks (5 minute presentations that just introduced the different maker spaces that were available to us in the room) and through listening to them I was able to get a list of possible collaborators/presenters for future staff development events and it helped to wake up my creative brain so I started thinking of other people/organizations I could reach out to. Such as?

Matthew Barinholtz with FutureMakers in Crownsville, MD. 
Gary Mauler with RobotFest in Linthicum, MD.

Attn: Children's Librarians. The two guys listed about would make knockout kids' programs.

After the lightning talks I got to feed the part of me that is Enneagram 7 by experiencing the maker spaces in the room. I immediately went to the RobotFest table and learned how to use the Scribbler program to make a robot do my bidding - bidding like playing a midi version of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, spinning around in a circle, and flashing its lights. I figure it's only a matter of time and money before I have my own Scribbler robot to do my important bidding like getting up at 6am and making me breakfast. I actually spent more than an hour playing with this robot and the software and it was so much fun. It took only a little explaining on Max's (RobotFest guru) part to get me started but after that, I was off and programming. 

A screenshot of the Scribbler program.

After I grudgingly left the RobotFest table (other people wanted to play, too) I had to find time to eat lunch and then attend an affinity talk. I didn't know it when I signed up for the talk but it was with the RobotFest guy, Gary Mauler. He talked about, "So you want to hold a festival for tinkerers?" He spoke a little about things libraries should consider if they wanted to hold a maker space event - particularly one focused on electronics and robotics - and other alternatives there might be for them to encourage creativity and the maker spirit in the community such as checking out DIY Inventor Kits like the ones sold by Sparkfun Electronics. The one less-than-attractive quality of checking out these kits is that you'd have to inventory every single itty bitty part that's in them. Or, you could just invest in buying a stash of replacement parts which are actually pretty cheap. He also says that it would help if the library subscribes to magazines like Make, Nuts and Volts, and Servo.

We ended the day with a keynote talk by Jeff Sturgis, founder of the Mt. Elliott Makerspace in Detroit, MI. Although the information and stories he shared were extremely captivating and energizing, they haven't yet sparked any ideas...more like a lot of best practices to keep in mind when trying to create a makerspace. Here's a hint: keep it simple, go slow, and don't do it alone.  

I know what you're thinking. So me the money. Right? As it turns out, DARPA offers grants for such projects (yes, DARPA) and Cognizant is offering similar funding opportunities. They have this crazy notion to help folks just like you create and launch 500 makerspaces in the country over the next 5 years. As you might imagine, they've been really active in the maker revolution. Just Google them and you'll find interesting articles. All you have to do is fill out the grant applications!

So what would I like to see happen in the western MD region? Well, here are a few ideas:

• Have a makerspace component at the Tri-County Summit 2013
• Start a library staff maker club (ala book clubs)
• Compile a list of staff in the three counties who have awesome maker skillz. You know who you are!
• Libraries subscribe to the maker magazines listed above and start to build up their collections with maker-type books and materials
•  WMRL could start their own makerspace collection (much like we started the emerging technology collection) for staff from the three counties to check out maker-type kits.

What ideas do you have? How can we play more at work? What would you like to see happen as a result of this new and novel trend?