8 Projects
Guiding novice makers as they build their skill set; sources for projects
Making things, and your love for making things with others, may be your main reason for starting a Makerspace. We hear from Makerspace managers that they can feel somewhat daunted doing the thing they and the kids love most! You might not know how to get started. That’s OK. Don’t overthink it, just start making!
Starter Projects
We recommend that you make something together to get your feet wet and see what it’s like to work together. It can be customizable or not. It could be one large group project or a simple project everyone can do. Of course, your Makerspace students may have very different levels of expertise. On the next page, we’ve listed some sources for simple workshops and starter projects you might consider as first projects.
When choosing a starter project, consider the diverse interests and skill sets of the members of your Makerspace, and make sure that the project you choose is open-ended enough to welcome all kinds of budding Makers into the culture. You may also want to keep in mind these activity design guidelines adapted from the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio:
Build on the kids’ prior interests and knowledge.
Choose materials and phenomena to explore that are evocative and invite inquiry.
Think of STEM education as a means, not an end in itself.
Provide multiple pathways (i.e., don’t ask your kids to adhere to rigid step-by-step instructions)
Starter Project Resources
Seek out simpler Instructables. Crafts for kids has projects on making playdough, oobleck, seed bombs and much more.
Build Howtoons projects.
Check out Das Bottle, mini-motor, Frankenmouse, nocturnal robot, turkey baster flute, speaker cup, cigar box guitar, marshmallows launcher, blimp, ornithopter, homemade strobe, light bending, tower, ice cream, and their Guide to Visual Communication.
Browse Make:Projects.
We’ve seeded this DIY project-sharing site with projects straight from the pages of Make magazine, and it has grown with many more submitted by our most creative readers. You can access step-by-step instructions and materials lists for hundreds of projects, but here are some tips for finding the simpler ones.
Some of the “Easy” projects should be do- able by new Makers and adaptable to challenge intermediate Makers: the Wind Triggered Lantern, Soda Bottle Rocket, or Cigar Box Guitar provide easy starting points.
The “Kids” topic page is a good place to start, too, but the projects are not all ones for kids to build; some they’d enjoy playing with.
You might also want to check out the most popular projects.
Tinker and explore.
The Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio developed some terrific hands-on explorations for our Open Make sessions. These are all documented with an overview of some of the reasons why you might want to do the project with your members, images of the process of making and using the project, and a discussion area at Projects include BlinkyBugs, BristleBots, Bling, Cardboard Automata, Chain Reaction, Circuit Boards, Circuit Necklaces, Get in the Groove (sound and vibration), Light Painting, Light Play, Marble Machines, “Mmmtsss”, Piezo Drum Circle, Plastic Fusing, Scribbling Machines, Sew a Circuit, Toy Take-Apart, and Wind Tubes.
Brainstorming Main Project Ideas
Coming up with an exciting but achievable project can be very challenging. If your members already have a clear idea for a project, congratulations! That’s great. They can start working on their designs and prototyping them. If they don’t know what they want to do, we’ve collected a few strategies that might get them going.
Figure out what you want to learn.
Another strategy is to pick a set of skills that you’d like to acquire (such as knitting, soldering, or welding), or a medium that you’d like to experiment with (such as wood, metal, or ceramics). Once you’ve narrowed it down, there are a few ways to get started:
Don’t hesitate to ask questions of people who have the knowledge you’re seeking. People are generally very happy to share what they know and are happy to help. If you find a Maker who has exhibited at Maker Faire and who has skills related to your project, they may be available to advise you—sometimes they include their email addresses on their project pages, or just tell us who you’re trying to get in touch with and we’ll try to make the connection.
See what others have done—often the enthusiasts will document their passions with great detail, enough to recreate and learn from them. Do web searches related to the skills and media you’ve been working with. You’ll very likely find countless blogs, websites, and organizations related to your interests.
Go buy some of the materials used in the medium you are interested in and tinker with them.
Cut and collect.
Disney Imagineers cut out a collection of images they find interesting, then they start arranging them in pairs or triplets to see if that triggers any interesting hybrid ideas.
Play with something new. Stimulate ideas by playing with a new material. Mylar, electroluminescent wire, shape-memory alloy,... any new material (or even an old material used in new ways) can jolt your imagination. Spend a long time with the material, experimenting in as many different ways with it as you can imagine, or look to see what others have done with this material by searching online.
See what’s out there.
To get your idea generator going, look at many examples of what other people have done. You can try to replicate the project exactly, but more likely you will add your own twist along the way. Some project sharing-sites most popular with Makers include…
Instructables: This vast database of thousands of projects submitted by a large user base contains a nearly inexhaustible resource of step- by-step instructions for a million different projects of all difficulty levels. Find both simple projects and deeper expertise when you get stuck on a project. You could spend half a lifetime browsing this site. (And don’t forget to contribute your project to the site after you’ve finished it, in order to help others.)
Past Maker Faires: Maker Faire booths, both what Makers have shared at Maker Faire and what we have previewed at events where we promoted an upcoming Maker Faire, also offer a lot of great ideas for projects. Browse nearly 4000 projects that have exhibited at previous Maker Faires in the Bay Area, Austin, Detroit, and New York City.
MAKE magazine: Every edition, filled with detailed project ideas and plans, is a well-spring of ideas. Aaron V. used his complete set of Make magazines, distributing one issue to each student in the class and asking them all to choose a project that appeals to them. As of late 2011, Make magazine has published 27 volumes. One note of caution: a few of the issues are out of print, so share your copies of the magazine carefully.
Makezine blog: Each day a number of posts describe thought- provoking projects, sometimes with links to instructions. Comments made by readers can also be very helpful.
Make Projects: A great source for starter projects as well as more ambitious ones, this user- contributor DIY project- sharing site has projects from MAKE magazine and its readers.
Go shopping for stuff.
An art teacher once said, “Half of art is shopping.” You could take your members on a field trip to an art, hardware, electronics, plastics, fabric,
dollar, or thrift store. If you can’t go to a real-world store, poking around online might work too. You can use your shopping trip as a time to talk about budgets and the hard task of finding supplies for projects. At the store, your members may find odd things to hack together, or new materials they hadn’t considered. IKEA Hackers is full of ideas for repurposing materials.
Go window-shopping.
Look at the wacky inventions in SkyMall magazine, found in many airlines’ seat-backs. If you know someone going on a flight, ask for some copies of SkyMall, and get a kick out of seeing what silly inventions people buy at high altitudes. You may also consider sites like Etsy and eBay, two sites rich with unconventional ideas from creative, resourceful people who sell vintage and handmade objects. Or search on Pinterest.
Do what you love. Focus on things you like, such as music, video games, or holidays.
Halloween and Christmas provide great opportunities. For Halloween you can make costumes or props for the yard. For Christmas, you can make wonderful decorations for your tree, your home, or your yard.
Have lots of Ideas. Dr. Linus Pauling famously said that the best way to have good ideas is to have LOTS of ideas. That is, create a list of as many ideas as you can, then start focusing on the ones that appear promising. Eventually you’ll winnow the list down to the good ones. Don’t be surprised if only a fraction of your initial ideas turn out to be good. That’s normal.
Some design educators swear by IDEO’s seven rules for brainstorming. These four are most relevant to brainstorming students’ projects: defer judgment, encourage wild ideas, build on the ideas of others, and go for quantity. To see all the rules explained, visit IDEO’s write-up on the seven rules.
Choosing big projects
For a final portfolio project, students should aspire to choose projects that are ambitious, yet attainable.
Attainable means reining in the idea just enough to acknowledge what expertise the student has and hope to gain, as well as the expertise of their current or potential mentors. Of course, attainability also means that the teams will need to keep an eye on budget.
Many great projects have been created with materials that have been scrounged, reclaimed, donated, and borrowed. If the materials aren’t on-hand, part of the work of the Makerspace will be sourcing the materials and supplies they need. And if they don’t have the money to pay for these out-of-pocket, like so many artists, engineers, and scientists, they may have to spend some of their project time writing to local and large businesses requesting discounts and donations.
Every once in a while several makers will work together all on one big project. The Young Sparks all worked together on the Water Totter. In our experience, though, most Makerspace members work on individual or team projects of their own design.
Speaking of large endeavors, don’t forget that a project doesn’t necessarily have to be an object. It can also be a performance or an experience created for others to enjoy, and these also require a great deal of logistical forethought and planning. (Learn more about project selection in the chapter on Projects.)
Ensuring Diversity of People and Projects
The Maker movement attracts a wide variety of people, and we think that’s one of its greatest strengths. Why is this? Perhaps because Makers are open to relating to a similarity in the depth of passion for one’s work and a way of working and being curious about the world, without necessarily sharing a prior interest in what is being made or how it is being made.
Makers might demonstrate a skill or craft, show a finished piece of work and explain it, and/or teach a skill or lead a hands-on activity. Makers can be anyone from yarn-spinners to hackers to terrarium makers to alt-energy vehicle designers to facilitators in the learn- to-solder booth. They might be performers: Musicians and dancers and snake-charmers fit this group. They might take a slot on the stage, or offer a guerrilla performance.
As you introduce the idea of making in your Makerspace, check that examples you share set the stage for a real variety show! Starter projects should include materials and phenomena that invite inquiry and provide multiple pathways for different kinds of skill sets and expertise. If you put together a slideshow of inspiring exhibits and performances from earlier Maker Faires, pull examples from all the categories of Making: arts, craft, engineering, food, green design, music, science, technology. Or you could think in terms of common theme areas usually present at Maker Faire, and encourage your students to distribute their projects across these areas: Electronics, Music, Crafters, Robotics, Lego Park, Bike Village, Farm / Food.
Keep the bar low for the newcomers: counterbalance the novelty and “geek factor” of the examples you share with projects that are, perhaps, not novel at all. Throw in some more common yet creative / delightful / lovely projects in with your examples. Some Makers might want to build their own Adirondack chair rather than a nifty Arduino-based gadget. That’s completely fine. Anyone who makes something gets into the whole universe of materials, tools and techniques.
That “normal” Adirondack chair can always come back next year and get geeked out with a built-in infrared remote that controls the lawnmower. Or they can some back and build a fine replica of a piece of 18th century furniture. You never know.
If you have students who bring widely varying levels of experience, it’s fine to pair a “newbie” with a project team that is working on something more advanced, as long as the newcomer and the team are all right with this. This approach helps newcomers participate at their skill level but contribute to something that would be beyond what they’d be able to accomplish on their own. For Saphira, the fire-breathing dragon, two of the team members were brothers who had worked on Maker Faire projects for three years together already. The third member brought in new expertise but less experience bringing a project from idea to Faire. It worked out very well for all.
A project for Maker Faire, and likewise for a Makerspace, does not necessarily need to be some kind of physical object that can be exhibited on a tabletop. In fact, some Makers are better featured performing, or talking, or teaching, or interacting with other Makers. Preparing for performance, hands-on interactive experience, or a live demonstration can require at least as much thinking ahead and logistical coordination as creating a new object.
For a hands-on workshop, your students might want to teach Maker Faire attendees how to ride a goofy bike, silkscreen a piece of clothing, play a musical instrument, launch a rocket, operate a remote control robot, or explore a cardboard jungle. Fairegoers line up for workshops like “How to Make Jam” or “How to Prune a Bonsai Tree.” Your students might demo something they learned together as a starter project or in class, like how to shake cream in a baby food jar until it becomes fresh butter.
A few Maker Faire hands-on exhibits that have entered the lexicon of “greatest hits,” and your students might volunteer to run these at a Maker Faire:
How to solder
How to take apart anything
How to build a simple circuit (like LED throwies)
Science experiments for kids
Make a rocket and launch it
Make a musical instrument
Fix your appliance
Learn to knit or sew
Clothing hack and swap: piles of donated clothing get picked through and transformed with hand- sewing, machine stitching, silkscreening, gluing, etc.
If your students do create a hands-on activity for fairegoers, they will want to keep in mind these tips for designing exhibits that engage the complete amateur:
Offer as many facilitators as possible.
Use signage or handouts to help guide the user.
Supply sufficient lighting and safety gear.
Design your booth to manage the people you interact with (e.g., one chair per user).
Provide a place for people to wait their turn.
Model safe use of tools and materials in your space.
If you have performers in your group, encourage them to transform the talents that they usually share with audiences by adding a Maker spin to their act. Musical acts that feature homemade or altered instruments fit well on a Maker Faire stage.
Kids who don’t usually consider themselves “performers” may also create a large demonstration that wows a crowd. Kinetic sculpture performances (e.g. big robots) or demonstrations (like the Coke and Mentos fountains pioneered by Eepybird).
Demonstrations might also be onsite builds where a maker sets up a shop and creates an item from scratch over several hours, such as an igloo formed out of empty gallon milk jugs. Some Makers create film or video projects to premiere at Maker Faire (although not all Maker Faire-inspired events set aside a space dark and quiet enough to screen a film—this may require some extra planning on your part.)
Finally, encourage your kids to think big! They might propose working together to create a large maze out of cardboard or a giant web of string. These large installations require a lot of testing and prototyping before the event site is open, but the payoff in big smiles could be as huge as the art they create.
One of the most surprising, stimulating and identifiable traits about Maker culture is the diversity of fields it encompasses. You can look far and deep into the nooks and crannies of your community to find inspiration for your students. Here is a list from the staff of Maker Faire for places to look for Makers. You can use it to brainstorm possible sources for Makers in your community who might come to your Makerspaces as special guests or mentors. Or you might take your Makerspace on a field trip to visit a studio or shop run by one of these Makers.
Communities of Makers in Your Community
Arts: Art Cars, Art Museums, Blacksmithing, Burning Man, Comic Groups, Filmmaking, Fiber Artists, Fire Arts, Holographic Groups, Kinetic Art Groups, Local Chapters of AIA and AIGA, LEGO Users Groups, Metal Arts, Neon Art, Painting, Photography Groups, Pinball Groups, Recycled Arts, Steampunk, Yo-yos
Crafts: Bazaar Bizarre, Bobbin Lace Makers Guild, Bookmaking and Bookbinding, Cardmaking, Ceramics & Pottery, Clothing Design, Craftster, Crocheting, Dollmaking, Embroidery (groups, associations), Etsy, Felting, Fiber Arts Groups, Folk Art, Glass Blowers, Jewelrymaking, Journalmaking, Knitting, Lacemaking, Modelmaking, Moldmaking, Mosaics, Museums of Craft and Folk Arts, Open Source Embroidery, Origami, Painting, Quilters, Renegade Crafts Fair, Scrapbooking, Sewing, Silkscreening Groups, Smart Materials, Soapmaking, Swap-O-Rama-Rama, The National Needle Arts (TNNA), Wax Sculptures, Weavers and Spinners, Woodworking
Engineering: 3D Printers, Amateur Aviation Groups, Amateur Radio Groups, Amateur Rocketry Groups, American Engineering Association, Arduino Groups, ArtBot Groups, ASME, BEST Robotics, Bicycle Groups, Car Repair Groups, Catapult Groups, Circuit Bending, CNC Groups, Combot Robots, Computer Modders, Computer User Groups, DIY Drones, DIY Energy, DIY Radio Groups, Dorkbot, Electric Cars, Engineers Without Borders, Fab Labs, FIRST Robotics, Hackers Groups, HAM Radio Operators, IEEE, Insect Bots, Intel Computer Clubhouse Network, LED Art, MIDI User Groups, Model Railroad Makerspaces, Odyssey of the Mind, R/C Model Makerspaces, Repair Groups, Rube Goldberg Groups, Soapbox Derby, Solar Cars, TechShop, Underwater Robotics, WALL-E Builders, Women In Engineering Groups
Food/Sustainability: Audubon & Bird Groups, Beekeeping, Beer Brewing, Cakemaking, Cheesemaking, Chocolate- making, Citizen Science, Composting, Cooking Classes, Culinary Programs, Edible Schoolyards, Edible Communities, Farmers’ Markets, Homegrown.org, Local Foragers, Master Gardeners, Molecular Gastronomy, Mycology, Permaculture, Preserving, Seed Saver Libraries, Slow Food, Vegetarian Groups, Winemaking, Urban Roots
Green: Calcars.org, Co-Housing, Community Bike Groups, Composting, Eco Modding, Fix Your Bike Groups, Green Arts Groups, Green Cleaning, Hybrid Car Groups, Recycling Groups, Solar Groups, Solar Ovens, Treehugger, Water Groups, Wind Power
Science: Adult Education/Community Colleges, Astronomy Makerspaces, Chemistry, DIY Biology, DIY Energy, DIY Forensics, DIY Science, Kitemaking and Flying, Paper Airplane Making, Robots, Rocketry Groups, Science and Technology Centers, Science Workshops, Space Exploration, Teachers Resource/Support Groups, Telescope Makers, Tesla Coils, University Programs, Zoology
Music: Circuit Bending, Dance Troupes, Electronic Music/Theremin, Instrument Hacking, Instrument Making, Jug Bands, Marching Band, Taiko Drummers, Theater Groups
Play: Board Games, Chess Groups, Computer Gaming, Halloween, Hula Hoops, Juggling, Star Wars Makerspaces
Organizing a Maker Faire
If you don’t have a Maker Faire happening near you, your Makerspace or school can take the lead in organizing one for your community or host it at your school. For more about creating a “Mini Maker Faire”, contact Sabrina Merlo sabrina@makerfaire.com and ask for the Maker Faire Playbook.
Defining scope
Give the participants free range in choosing their project and then help them narrow the scope through planning and experimentation. Part of the Maker’s process is dealing with the realities of time and budget as well as developing new skill sets, and it’s more fun to watch the kids think through their goals than to give them “assignments”.
For example, if a student says they want to build a spaceship, definitely encourage them (and agree how cool that would be), but then ask some probing questions about what part of the experience they’re most interested in so you can adapt the project accordingly. If they want to physically crawl into a box and perhaps feel a sensation of weightlessness, then maybe we’d start a discussion about constructing an isolation/flotation tank. If they are more interested in propulsion, then maybe a scale model rocket might be an appropriate starter project. Interested in the view looking back down onto the earth? Start an exploration about the possibility of a remote camera attached to a balloon. Encourage the kids’ wild ideas, but then engage them in thinking about where you might find the construction parts, and whether they would need to be purchased or could be salvaged or recycled. This kind of discussion will lead the students to their own realizations about what might be practical but still allow them to fully define their own project goals.
Setting schedules
Unrealistic expectations about time-budgeting for projects happens all the time with Makers young and old. In this program, building the projects usually happens outside of group meeting time. Individual projects may be developed by the students during evenings at home or on weekends in a collaborative workshop setting with available mentors. This may be a scheduling challenge for kids with a lot of extracurricular activities like team sports, music lessons, etc. but the kids get out what they put in over the duration of the program. Students who won’t see their mentor(s) frequently enough may find weekly phone chats or Skype check-ins useful for trying to build momentum early on so the work doesn’t fall onto the last weekend before their deadline.
Help with project management can come from you or just about anyone who interacts with the student—other mentors, fellow students, their parents, but when all is said and done, this is the final responsibility of the students, not you. Project Plans can help them with time management, and we’ve included a template in the Resources section. These consist of a list of tasks or action items, each one matched to a person responsible for its completion, and due dates assigned to each action item. Any mentors assigned to the team should get a copy of the Project Plan so they can check in on progress with the team or with its individual members. (A Project Plan template is in the Resources section.)
Teaching new skills & keeping it fresh
Don’t get so caught up in the logistics of creating your Makerspace that you forget why you’re doing this. Make some quick projects together all along the way, even if the project isn’t directly related to any of the projects being built in your Makerspace. (It may help the teams think about their project in a new way!) Do something your students already enjoy doing, or take on a project that includes new talents the students want to add to their skill set.
In the Bay Area, the Young Makers program (a cousin of Makerspace) has partnered with the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio, which has been introducing some new approaches and techniques during the Open MAKE sessions including both “Skill Swaps” on the museum floor, and a mini Maker Faire with five to ten Makers sharing their projects, often with a hands-on element. See the chapter on Projects to get a sense of the kinds of projects you can do in a short time frame.
Don’t forget to expose students to new ideas, even if these don’t have an obvious connection to the projects they are creating. During each Open MAKE session at the Exploratorium, we ended the day with Dale Dougherty interacting with a panel of three to six inspiring Makers. These presentations and discussions, called “Meet the Makers” are archived on the Exploratorium website.
Make magazine, and the Make blog provide great reading and some video links, as do TED talks and Instructables. Encourage your students to go to lectures, events, and a variety of museum exhibitions, to talk to friends, to spend some downtime exploring the web and letting their imaginations roam.
Working together and apart
Sharing a Makerspace as your workshop or studio means having abundant opportunities to share progress on projects and getting helpful feedback, and unsticking those who are stuck. In our experience meetings can get in the way of getting work done, so you’ll want to hold them sparingly.
With more ambitious projects, students may need to plan extra time to work on their projects, and to look at their project plan and identify the things they can do on their own at home (sketches, designs, research, programming, etc.) and what they need to do in the Makerspace with their partner. The number and duration of build sessions will depend on the progress and scope of the projects being made in your Makerspace. Between meetings, students might discuss their projects on social networks, chat rooms, email, and so forth. If you find an online discussion tool that works for your students, please tell us about it.
One thing to keep in mind is that in preparing for a showcase event where your students my exhibit their work, such as a Maker Faire, the work is unlikely to progress linearly. That is, it’s rare to meet someone who can pace themselves equally across a four-month timeline. More likely, a project will be 5% done in the first month, 10% more over each of the next two months, and the bulk of the work—at least ⇠—in the final month. (Yes, a project may require over 100%!)
In the final month before a project deadline, teams will be very busy finishing their projects and preparing to talk about them with attendees of the showcase event (like a Maker Faire.) This is a good time to set aside an intensive work session when your students can spend a large chunk of time getting their project 95% of the way to being finished—and if not finished, then at least presentable. The energy of lots of people working together in an intensive build session propels everyone forward. You’ll want to have lots of enthusiastic and supportive mentors on hand to help get the projects where they need to be. Those mentors can also help revise designs and cheerfully manage expectations and refocus on a modified goal as needed.
Teacher tip: Encouragement (without empty praise)
Encouragement takes a lot of work. Stay on top of the teams to see how they are doing, and to make sure they haven’t abandoned their work in a moment of deep frustration.
Compliment the way that kids try different things at least as much as you heap praise on the results. That is, something like “I admire how you worked through that hard problem. I noticed how you tried [x], [y], and [z] and you stuck with it until you figured it out,” effectively fosters confident learners, more than a thousand “Good job!” comments.
Refining scope
Around the mid-point of working on any project, creative people often experience a dip in their enthusiasm for its completion, and new, younger Makers are no exception to this. Sometime a little over halfway through your time working together, start a conversation about refining the scope of the projects. Refining scope is a dear companion to the original task of defining scope, and many engineers, designers, and makers of all stripes take this necessary step when the hours left to work on a project are more tangible. Many makers get started with fantastic ideas, and after working on these for a few months or so there’s a definite risk of losing their enthusiasm as the reality looms. That reality is the overwhelming feeling of all that needs to happen before the deadline as the initial excitement of coming up with the idea fades into the past. All Makers face down discouragement.
Finishing up
The interest and excitement students can expect from attendees at Maker Faire is worth it. Try to find out if there is anything you can do to help your students achieve their vision. And thank them for setting such an incredible example of what can be accomplished when kids and adults come together to make things.
Some of your students will have projects nearly done ahead of schedule, and you can congratulate them and challenge them to find ways to enhance their projects or the way that others interact with it or understand their process, or to document how and why they made their project to share it on the web and generate some buzz for their cool project. Generally, far more students, especially in the final month before your deadline, feel that they don’t have much to show yet and that they are running out of time. Don’t let them lose heart! Remind yourself and them that the extraordinary creativity and innovation that they’ve all demonstrated is really inspiring. We frequently see an expression of wonder and surprise as we describe to people the projects undertaken by students, even when those projects are nowhere near complete.
Here’s another way to look at projects that are incomplete. Maker Media sponsors the “Most Spectacular Failure” award at The Tech Challenge at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. While the award’s name makes people laugh, it also recognizes that there is no shame in taking on something beyond one’s reach. As long as they have put in real effort, your makers will have done their best work. That alone is something to be proud of. Encourage them to keep going. As they hit stumbling blocks, have them document what those challenges are, and be proud to share whatever progress they made at the showcase event (such as a Maker Faire). Whether the project is a tangled heap of lots of great ideas that didn’t pan out when they sit down to show it off—or it’s a fabulously finished realization of their original design—assure them that attendees will be impressed, especially if they tell a compelling and interesting story.
Getting Past Makers’ Block
To trick yourself back to work, tell yourself that you’ll work on it for “just 10 minutes.” Often you’ll find that the time flies by and before you know what happened you spent 45 minutes advancing your project!
Revisiting or creating a new project plan can help. Plan ahead and scale back. You may have lots of ideas and not know which one to tackle first. For this version of the project plan, look at all the things you want to do and decide which ones are “musts”, which are “nice to haves” and which are “things we’re not doing now but we may do them laters.” Try to map those things onto a calendar, giving yourself milestones along the way. If you don’t finish everything for your deadline, it’s OK. Get as much as you can done and be prepared to talk about what you’ll add for next year!
Make sure that you break up your project into manageable, bite-sized tasks. Often something seems daunting because you’re seeing the task as the entire project. If you break it up into small micro tasks, then you can feel a sense of completion and accomplishment EACH TIME you complete one of the micro tasks.
When you find that a project is rapidly becoming overwhelming or you come to it at the start of your build session, and you have so much on your plate that you just don’t know where to start, just pick a place and begin. Don’t angst over whether or not it was the best place to jump in, the priorities and sequences of activities will come to you once you’re working. Many of us get hopelessly bogged down trying to sort of priorities, which task to do first, etc.
Tell others about your project to get you psyched all over again—and motivated to continue on!
Connect to why you decided to do this in the first place. First, look at how great it would be to have it done: “the benefits”. Then, connect to “the costs” for not getting it done. Finally, look at what’s possible and state what can get done and by what date. - Feeling how great it would be and why it’s important. And make sure not to beat yourself up for not getting it done yet.
Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird refers to a school project on birds that her brother waited until the last minute to start on, when they were kids. Her brother sat at the kitchen table, a stack of books on birds and a pile of 3x5 cards in front of him. He was paralyzed by the task. His dad came in, patted him on the shoulder and said: “bird by bird, son, just take it bird by bird.” So when Anne is stuck in her writing, she thinks about those 3x5 cards and the bird project and tells herself that she just needs to take it one bird (one paragraph, one simple task, one 3x5) at a time. This can be very helpful when you get overwhelmed.
Exhibition, not competition
What distinguishes the work of makers in education is our emphasis on exhibition, not competition. We feel that the pressure of a deadline and wanting to put your best work before many observers motivates adequately without adding in the extra noise of battle or judges. Makers can tell if their project has succeeded or failed, or at least if they have succeeded in communicating their project, by how much interest their project generates with Maker Faire visitors.
Attendees vote with their feet and the time they spend interacting and asking questions. The interest visitors pay to a project provides evaluative feedback and give makers a sense of accomplishment. We think that’s very appropriate: in the real world, it’s rare to have a head-to-head battle or a panel of judges deciding whether your work gets its just reward. Maker Faire is a marketplace of ideas, just like the world of business.
Depending on your showcase event, the students’ projects will be seen by dozens to many thousands of attendees. Obviously, your students won’t interact with every attendee, but they need to plan ahead to make sure that those who do see their project can understand what makes it wonderful. As months of work finally come to a close, your students should prepare to show off not just what they made, but also evidence of how they made it — sketches and prototypes or anything else that can help them explain their process. (Compare examples of telling the story behind the projects in our Documenting chapter.)
Give your participants some talking points for Maker Faire, as people may ask them how they can start a Makerspace or get involved in the Maker movement. Give them any data you have, like how many projects your Makerspace made, how many aggregate person- hours you worked on the projects, how many people attended any events you may have hosted, etc. If you have any links to great images, photo sets, videos, or media mentions, share those too—whether those cover the event, your Makerspace or its projects.
Share them with people who ask, and share them with us too! Send links to contact@makerspace.com, and we’ll send them along to others.
During the event, be sure to congratulate each student on their project, and try to get at least one picture of their project and of them exhibiting it. You may need these for your debrief, website, scrapbook, etc.
Teacher tip: Embracing failure, and keeping it safe
Let the kids fail, while monitoring their safety. Occasional failure, and the accompanying recovery and adaptation, are an important part of the learning process. If you think you see something faulty, point it out (in advance if possible), but try to avoid insisting things be done a certain way unless safety is an issue. You’ll be surprised how many different paths lead to the same goal, or what new ideas are developed by accident.
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