Maker Ed Maker Corps

Maker Ed is a non-profit based in the Bay Area. They are a sister company of Maker Media (Make Magazine, Maker Faire) and work to support making in schools.

I recently applied for Maker Ed’s spring teacher training and teaching position called “Maker Corps”, and got selected! We, the “Maker Corps Members”, spend 6 weeks training in Maker Education and then 6 weeks working at a school or community space. I will be working at the Creativity Lab at Lighthouse Community Charter School -a K-12 school in Oakland, that recently sent some young makers to The White House!

As part of the training we were sent a “possibility box”, which is full of (yes you guessed it) possibilities for making! Included is Intel’s Galileo, Flora, MaKey MaKey, Squishy Circuits, Little Bits, Drawdio, tape, paper, hot glue, soldering iron and much much more (see image below)! Each week we are invited to experiment with a different material, and we share this with the community of Maker Corps Members.

Knolling the possibility box by Brent Richards, who is also a Maker Corps Members, and currently studying an MFA in Art and Technology

The spring training has officially ended, and we have moved on to the summer sessions, but I am just getting round to finishing some of the projects and posting them here. The first week was a tinkering week -and I got very excited about he MaKey Makey and yarn. I made some conductive pompoms, and made some pompom sensors that drummed when touched.
Ideas -my scribblings of light sensitive pompom clothing and *conductive pom pom world*. It will happen. It will!
All the materials one might need to make a musical pompom: Yarn, conductive thread, scissors, card, and MaKey MaKey.
Pompoms -mixed in with conductive thread = conductive pompoms.
A makeshift ground connection to close the circuit.

Pompoms in action -testing how they work with the simple MaKey MaKey software.