This past Saturday, The Makerspace joined the East Side Peoples’ Festival at Genesis Lutheran Church. The East Side Peoples Festival is an event where various East Side people and organizations gather to share their work, ideas, and passion for their community. It was a fun day packed with demos, examples, and lots of wonderful people interested in learning about the Makerspace and getting involved.

We had many of our alternative energy “toys” on display, and some of the more curious youngsters began building their own wind turbines without any instruction! A particularly bright fella discovered that if he attached his turbine to the bike generator, he could create a refreshing breeze to cool himself off as he pedals! Sadly, the bike generator proved to be a bit much for the wee turbine, and we eventually burnt it out entirely. A worthy sacrifice!

After a couple of OpenShops, Raven has successfully fixed a stereo and re-wired both speakers!! Now it is time to celebrate with a ‘lil dance!!

Now that we have completed our first session of AwesomeShops, we are collaborating with our makers to figure out what to do in terms of projects and workshops for the summer that will make for interesting learning experiences and good times. To do so, we kicked off a process of “sticky note” brainstorming so that everyone could contribute their ideas, organize them into categories, and pick their favorites.

With a bit of persuasion and priming, the ideas started trickling forth. Soon enough, we had a flood on our hands, and we almost ran out of sticky notes! When finished, we stepped back and looked proudly upon a boardful of incredibly creative ideas. By moving them around on the board and grouping similar ideas together, we were able to combine some into larger, more comprehensive projects, as well as begin to refine the focus areas for the Makerspace itself. We’re still hashing things out, but by next week we should be able to nail down some amazing summer projects.

Our final day was supposed to consist of more wind turbine work, but unfortunately over half of the makers were absent due to a mandatory school function. Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me about this stuff? Doh!

No worries though…we made the best of it by having those who were able to make it work on other outstanding projects such as bike amps, repair projects, learning how to use the computers, etc.

At the end of the session, we awarded our makers their Certificates of Completion. As the first makers to complete our prototypical AwesomeShops, I’d say it was quite an honor for both the teachers and the makers alike!

Today during Open Shop, Raven and continued our work repairing the discarded stereo (See Electronics Rescue! Part 1). We finished reassembling the body with the newly soldered power cord, and began work on the speakers.

In order to access more wire inside the speaker splice new leads we needed to use the drill and the Dremel to cut ‘em out. Raven LOVED learning about the tools that cut holes, lines, and make noise!

Next up: Splicing the speaker wires and finishing it off