Bay Area Maker Faire recap

I’ve seen some cool best of Bay Area Maker Faire posts (list, slideshow).  Here is a recap of my favorites:

Jie Qi gave a fabulous talk on paper circuits and all of her work is beautiful.  Her talk was so good that the sound guy said it was the best talk of the two days he was working.  Check out her pop-up book and and interactive LED painting.  

Shaper is a self-aligning, hand-held CNC router. It uses tape printed with dominos laid on the work pieces to locate itself.  It can do fine alignment when you are close to the shape you want.  Awesome if you want to do some cutting but don’t have any room for a large router.  They said it would retail around $1-2k.

Remember Bop It? (Bop it!  Pull it!  Twist it!)  There was a large person-size one that shot fire for the different motions.  Bop it was a pedal, pull it was a rope, twist it was a bike wheel.  It was super cool. My high score was 6.  :)

I enjoyed all things Maker Ed.  Went to a talk by teachers of High Tech Middle, who talked about inquiry-based learning in the classroom.  Also attended a talk by Samantha Cook of Curiosity Hacked, who talked about learner-centered education (check out this article about how she is hacking education).  Missed AnnMarie Thomas’s talk on making makers, but ran into her later (check out her Squishy Circuits).

See you at NY Maker Faire in the fall!

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