Maker Faire 2013 Round up

KLC had the privaledge of attending World Maker Faire 2013 in New York this year, with our own table and a fun marshmallow launcher for the kids to make! It was an exhausting, amazing weekend -- for me, my husband, Steve, and for my daughters, Caitie and Gwen. Maker Faire is a complete creative explosion. Even with four days to explore, I still wanted more time to check out all the wonderful projects!

That's me, ready to go early on Saturday morning.
Folks started lining up long before the gates opened at 10 am!

As a I mentioned previously, we attended Maker Faire Education Day on Thursday, then we were back out to Queens on Friday afternoon for our official set up and dinner.

Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of MAKE, hands out paella to all the
makers on Friday night. Thanks for the dinner Dale! It was great!

Gwen, ready to go and marshmallows loaded.

Our friend Linda stopped by both days to help us out, thankfully.
We made A LOT of marshmallow catapults with kids and adults!

So we all had fun and launched hundreds (thousands?) of marshmallows all over the Zone E. But what other booths were awesome? Well, glad you asked...

I have to start by giving a shout out to our friends at Let's Make Robots. These guys are doing great work helping everyone in the world learn to build and program their own bots. And they're fun to grab a beer with as well. Chris Robinson, of Rocket Brand Studios, talked himself horse both days, explaining some of the great projects created by LMR members. (BTW, we highly recommend Rocket Brand's robots and use the Tadpole in our robotics classes at KLC.)

I also want to give props to some young makers from KLC's neck of the woods. The guys with The 721st MCB, an Amateur Radio Club from Warren County NJ who brought their amazing E-APS Emergency Antenna Platform System to share with the world. This lightweight open source portable tool helps Amateur Radio Operators deploy HF and VHF/UHF antennas high in the field using standard parking lot light / flag poles. Great work!

Now, as some of you know, I love soft circuits, e-textiles and wearable electronics. So I was super exciting to see and meet Becky Stern on Friday night! She was even wearing her Firewalker shoes! I loved the work of bitwise, Blockuits, and Make Anything. All had prejects just right for young makers!

Other favorites included the fantastic fractals at Fractal Kit, the cool recycled boats made with the ScrapKins folks, the great bicycle powered blender by Frankenbike and Friends, the amazing arduino controlled RC toy car by RoboTech, (need to get that one for a KLC class) and the novel approach to working with DNA from Gemonikon. 

I could go on and on, but I won't. There was simply too much awesome to put it all in a blog post. But if you want to take a look for yourself, the hardworking editors at MAKE have been posting like mad.

KLC was awarded an Editor's Choice award! How cool!