Maker Fun

DIY Dream Catchers for Story Makers Sophie: What do you do for work?  BFG:  I catch dreams.  Whilst other giants use the 'witching hour' to gobble up people the BFG is doing something nice for them by giving them their dreams instead. And this is how Sophie, who wakes up in the middle night, first spots the BFG, he is blowing a dream into the bedroom window of the children across the street.  In both the book and the film the BFG is surrounded by dreams he has bottled and that is the inspiration for this make - to make a dream catcher complete with a dream. But before you reach for a jam jar and fairy lights and given that dreams are both mysterious and magical, why not create your own unique light show to represents your bottled and dream.  NeoPixels are easy to program with a micro:bit. Here I have created a NeoPixel string from 4 x Flora RGB NeoPixels and programmed in Python using the code editor here . You could also use a ...

Maker Fun is celebrating Hannah Festival this week by developing new makes for the summer. We are enjoying the good weather and taking inspiration from the garden  as a starting point for activities. We made sun pictures, a big hotel for bugs and a hang out for fairies. This is just the start we have lots more ideas to try out.     Bug hotels Fairy Dens 

Thanks for having me at Manchester CoderDojo earlier today. Some great micro:bit programs being created, will put code not cakes onto the  #microbit  website.    I finally have something cooler than twinkle twinkle to play out on my micro:bit. Name that tune?!

Two weeks to go to our Hannah Festival celebration and it is all hands on deck to get our Aerobots finished to support our first robot workshop. Follow our journey in pictures. Find out more about this year's Hannah Festival .   1. From BOM to unwrapping! 2. Preparing to apply the solder paste 3. Three up, now with solder paste  4. Double sided tape holds those tiny components in place  5. Really wishing I had my reading glasses 6. Vacuum pick and place by hand   7. First Aerobot out of the oven 8. Triplets! Many thanks to Kitronic  for letting me hang out out their place and cook up my first three robots in their lovely oven!

Here is a first look at my new yellow Maker Fun Aerobot boards and a glimpse of my hot off the press (literally) Robot Fun T-shirt made at Fab Lab Manchester yesterday! 

Having challenged myself to make my first robot I placed an order for 15 circuit boards.  On the 29th of January I received my first batch of 15 'drink coasters'.  If you would like to buy one feel free to get in touch! How did my robots turn into coasters? Lesson Number 1:  When downloading open hardware files make sure that ALL the files are the latest version.  Check, double check and check again before you click on order, buy or get anywhere near the checkout. If you  the don't you may end up with circuit art.  It is not that I didn't look at the files before I ordered them it's just that I hadn't realised I could open all the files simultaneously in my gerber viewer.  Thankfully 3pcb.com have a hands on approach that goes beyond simply making what you ask for and extends to checking your files. When I asked them to print a stencil that didn't match the board they explained the problem.  Karen...

Just before Christmas I saw this article in Wired for a DIY  10 dollar robot  called AERobot. Not to be confused with an aerial robot this is an affordable educational robot, AERobot. It does all the cool things that you would want of a first robot like following edges, lines and light too. The robot can be programmed using a graphical programming language called Minibloqs  and it captured my imagination as being the perfect project for getting young children into robotics.  Michael Rubenstein and colleagues at Harvard Research give a really good overview of the AERobot:   Join me over the course of the next few weeks as my robot adventure evolves from bare boards to a world record attempt and lots of lessons learnt in between! 

Sonic 'Pet' Pi I was looking for inspiration for getting started with Sonic Pi and found this quirky compilation by Sarah Angliss. Her Sonic Pi composition features an adorable dog, fascinating music archive from a time when music was printed on cylinders not vinyl and lots of imagination. Take a look.  Find your own music gems here: The Internet Archive . And more Sonic Pi inspiration from the Sonic Pi: Live and Coding  website. 

Looking back on Maker Fun's first year we have delivered 26 events, and over 450 'makes'. Over 430 kids have taken part, joined by over 200 parents! We have hosted our own events at our local village library, supported our local Coderdojos in Manchester and Stockport, and delivered events at Museums. Our top three activities were: 'Making Dragon Snot and Slime', turning Jitter Bugs into 'Art Bots' and our popular 'Dashing Reindeer and Dancing Angels' with a Frozen make-over, enter Sven and Anna and Elsa. Missed out? Then check out our Maker Fun Recipes and bring Maker Fun home. Our most memorable event was our first Maker Faire at Newcastle Centre for Life. We hoped others would be interested in our club and were overwhelmed with the positive comments and response. What's next? We want to reach double the number of kids and families next year. We would like to launch the Maker Fun Library too!

Elsa and Anna joined the staff at Startpoint Coffee shop bringing Disney magic and sparkle to the Christmas light switch on at Woodley this weekend.  We made dashing Sven's and dancing Anna and Elsa's using a vibrating motor, a paper cup, a coin cell, and some craft materials.  No time to come to an event then download one of our activity sheets and do it yourself at home.  See our latest activities. More Maker Fun with Olaf. What is your funniest Frozen joke? Mine is about Olaf. Here comes Olaf.  Q. What is Olaf's favourite food? A. Frozen carrots No! Click on Olaf to find out.  Now try it for yourself! Click on the 'remix' button and make your own ' meme ' using Mozilla Webmaker. Here a meme is a picture and some text that can be copied and changed by others and shared again.  Mozzilla Thimble will open and the tutorial will guide you through how to make your meme! ...

Warning Contains Spoilers! Thanks to Eddie, Ellen and James Stockport CoderDojo has got their very own Christmas e-card. It's amazing what you can do with a Raspberry Pi and lots of great ideas! We converted our table top animation rig into a top down rig with a painted background. Just add imagination! Now try this yourself at home. You will need: 1 x Raspberry Pi 1 x Pi camera 1 x bread board  1 x push button switch 2 male to female jumper leds Miss Philbin from Geek Gurl Diaries shows you how to get started with your Pi camera. For written step-by-step instructions on how to write a simple python program to turn you Pi-Camera into push button camera, to take  your first self and then set up your own stop motion then check out these resources from the  Pi Foundation . 

What would it be like to live on Mars? We took a light hearted look at what life might be like  on Mars in 2025. We added biospheres for living and growing crops and a swimming pool to relax. We captured life on our planet using a Raspberry Pi and a pi cam that we put together as a stop motion studio.    Space Pi at Manchester CoderDojo  By the end of the session we had our own s atellite dish  engineered from a  LittleBits Space Kit.  Ready to broadcast those first reports and give the people left on Earth a unique insight to life on Mars in 2025.     What will the journey from Earth to Mars  be like for those first astronauts? Here is  a short clip from the film 'Roving Mars'  that follows the journey of the Mars Explorer Rover Spirit from launch to landing on Mars. Much of the footage is computer generated  but based on photos and data from other...

Every time I go to a CoderDojo I have this moment where I look around during the session and glimpse the future.  Today the kids and young people at  Manchester CoderDojo  were building a ghost train in Minecraft, creating space animations with a Raspberry Pi, learning Python, exploring Scratch & creating role playing games in Javascript. Take a 30 second tour and see for yourself. Why is it amazing and awesome? Within the next decade I think some of the most important inventions and technological  advances will come from kids who went to CoderDojo on a regular basis. It might be ground breaking nano-tech or a biotech cure for the incurable, or more likely stuff that I can't even imagine yet. But as I looked around Manchester CoderDojo today I had that feeling that great things start like this.  That is with a bunch of kids from 6 to 17 who think coding and being creative with technology is a fun, cool thing to do with yo...

Eureka is an amazing place for young curious minds. We were so pleased to be asked to help deliver activities as part of their 'Made by Me' season.  In the latest Eureka blockbuster two snakes fall in love, Elsa gets her own back a throws snow balls at Olaf and two ducks dance the day away. Here are the results, animations made by you on the 23rd of August at Eureka!   Many thanks to the staff and visitors who welcomed us and supported the workshops. If you are new to making save the date and go to  Halifax Mini Maker Faire  on Saturday 30th August.  It’ll be a family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and imagination, celebrating the Maker in all of us.

Here is Part 1 of our amazing animated short created at Manchester Mini Maker Faire this Saturday. Thank you to all of our stop motion artists who created crazy characters to tell even crazier stories. Rabbit outwits the skinny fox, Pac-man makes a return and much more! Want more? See Part 2 our Sunday Film. Sven saved Elsa from a burning building but Snowman was blasted by a Creeper.   These animations were created with plasticine, using A Raspberry Pi computer and lots of imagination!  We used a bread board and buttons connected to the GPIO pins on the Pi instead of relying on a GUI interface. We made tweaks late into the night a head of the show.   

Wow, we had a fantastic time at Manchester Mini Maker Faire. The whole family came to deliver our 2 second animation challenge! kids created their own characters from plasticine and brought those stories to life using stop motion animation. We were able to show and tell lots of families about our latest Raspberry Pi project.   We captured an amazing 40 animations over two days. With an average of just two seconds per animation we are 'chaining' those animations together to create two short films for each day at the faire. Congratulations makers you created awesome animations. Check back tomorrow when we will publish the films!   

I think you will agree Robin Hood is as nimble and as swashbuckling as ever! We celebrated the final session of this series of Maker Fun with a cool a stop motion animation work shop led  by guest animator Paul Claessens .  We rebuilt and re-programmed our Raspberry Pi to create this stop motion kit.     Our  star  maker of month  was the first to try out our new Raspberry Pi set-up.  He created his first animated short; the Adventures of Robin Hood Re-told in 5 Seconds!   We had so much fun we are going to take our stop motion set to Manchester Mini Maker Faire . Pop along to the MOSI next weekend if you would take the 2 second challenge and help us create a chain animation.  

We did it! We captured the moment our Painted Ladies emerged from their chrysalides using our Butterfly Pi. There really is a Pi and Pi cam buried in that awesome Lego housing!     Why don't you put your Raspberry Pi to use this Summer and capture what nature is doing in your back garden! Don't forget to share it. #makerfun #raspberrypi It was a lovely sunny day when we released the butterflies and we couldn't believe what happened next. Our Painted Ladies crept up onto the girls fingers for a little help with their great escape.  They were in no hurry to leave and we were all fascinated by the chance to observe them before they finally flew away.  I t was a magical metamorphosis. We raised 5 very hungry caterpillars that ate so much they exploded to eight times there original size. They hung upside down and turned into Chrysalides. Check out our Caterpillar Pi video  too. Bef...

A few weeks ago the kids got a butterfly hatching kit from their favourite aunt.  Can you guess what our caterpillars got up to last night? As you can see caterpillar  number three became a chrysalis! Now we have three chrysalides and a crazy, hungry caterpillar still throwing shapes into the night. How did this happen? The caterpillar hangs in a 'j' shape and sheds their exoskeleton for one last time before hardening into a chrysalis.  We hope to capture the birth of our butterflies in a week or so time. How did we do it? We hooked up our pi with pi-camera and attached an eye- glass to shorten the focal length of the pi-camera.  We used a cold light to light up the scene into the night. Check out our lego housing. We can change the height of the camera using the gears! We modified an existing time-lapse program.  There is lots of great stuff out there:  For inspiration and to discover other great projects...

Maker Fun Summer events started this week with our crazy scurrying art bots!   We are so pleased to be back for a new series of events and have had an amazing week supporting the launch of the 2014-2015 Hannah Directory.      Kevin Fitzpatrick from Radio Manchester came to visit Maker Fun HQ, also known as our 'kitchen table' and recorded a fantastic report for the Mike Sweeny show. Mike was on great form and his show amplified the message that there are so many great things happing in communities across the North West.  The Hannah Directory goes even further and connects  50 inspi ring people and organisations from Newcastle to Gateshead, Durham, Leeds, Sheffield, Huddersfield, Manchester, Stockport, Preston, Barrow and Liverpool:  www.hannahfestival.com . It's a diverse collective combing old and traditional knowledge and a celebration of community endeavour.    We are prou...