In summer of 2010, Eric Rosenbaum from the MIT Media Lab came to the learning studio as an artist-in-residence and worked on a prototype for a computer interface called project Q, a circuit board that could turn anything electrically conductive into a computer key. Now Eric and Jay Silver (another repeat tinkering studio collaborator) have launched a kickstarter page (and are already fully funded!) for the final version of this project, now retitled MaKey MaKey (and we thought project Q was catchy). These two guys have come up with many brilliant ideas (scratch, mmmtsss, drawdio, glow doodle, and singing fingers) that we’ve borrowed for workshops and exhibits. From the videos and photos on the MaKey MaKey page, this one looks like it’s going to be another incredibly fun tool for tinkering.
Eric, Jay and a bunch of MaKey MaKey boards will be at Maker Faire in San Mateo this weekend. Come by and check them out!
In the Tinkering Studio, there is a Cabinet of Curiosities, where we display some beautiful work by artists whom we got inspired by or whose work goes along with the Open Make themes.
We also display some things that visitors (or some of us) made during the Tinkering Studio’s activities. Since things in the cabinet have been changing from month to month (Nicole has been in charge of curating the cabinet along with the themes of Open Make), I thought I would like to share what kind of stuff are displayed in our cabinet currently.
With the theme of “Trash” last month, most of the stuff in the cabinet are trash related.
This is a dress made of tons of snickers bags! And a beautiful pull tab necklace.
Of course, we have pieces of our artist in residence last month, Paul Spooner. This is one of his classic automata : Spaghetti Eater. On the side, there is also a video to show his automata in action.
At the bottom of Paul’s automata, there are Walter’s trash automata. Making automata out of trash was one of the activities that we did at Open Make last month. We are going to have this activity at Maker’s Faire too!
In the week before the last open make, we were thrilled to have automata artist http://tinkering.exploratorium.edu/paul-spooner/in residence in the learning studio. Paul works and lives in Cornwall, England so it was an absolute treat that he said yes to coming all the way out to San Francisco and the Exploratorium for the first time. Paul is part of the Cabaret Mechanical Theater, a group of automata builders who have inspired our thinking for many years. He brought some amazingautomata to show us, was interviewed by Dale Dougherty as a featured maker at open make: trash (although he has nothing to do with the theme, we couldn’t pass up the chance), and worked with Walter and the group to help develop the trash automata activity. And although we hadn’t thought that he would make anything specific while visiting, after a few hours in our workshop, he started messing about with some scrap wood in the corner of the room.
Paul’s project ended up being a sort of perpetual dog food dispenser. The machine starts off with a nudge by a hungry canine that starts a pendulum swinging. The little triangle piece at the top moves over the lever when the arm swings fast, but as the motion of the pendulum slows down, the piece catches and releases a can of dog food (simulated in the prototype by a metal cylinder). The can of dog food rolls down a ramp and hits the pendulum, starting the system again. In a finished version, multiple cans of dog food would be queued up in a rack and would get released one by one. The only problem for the dog would be figuring out how to use a can opener to get the meal.
While in the time he was here, Paul didn’t get to finish the machine, but that wasn’t really the point. Just watching and talking to him as he worked through the challenges of the contraption taught us a lot about workign on automata. The solutions he came up with for the machine were functional, unexpected and elegant. Having such a fun and inspiring artist working alongside us in the learning studio is truly one of the very best things about our job.
Last week, in preparation for bringing the set-up maker faire, we set up a large scale animation station in the Tinkering Studio. At the end of the day, one of the visiting monastics, Somnam, came by and helped us make a really fun movie called “The Great Squircle”. Enjoy!
This summer we’re starting an outreach program at a couple of boys and girls clubs in the city in an attempt to bring tinkering activities to community centers outside the museum. As a first test and a preview of coming attractions, we did a scribbling machines workshop with an amazingly inventive and artistic group of kids at the Columbia Park club. We spent about an hour and a half working through the many challenges that came up with getting their contraptions to draw either consistent or inconsistent lines, squiggles, or blobs. Our whole group was impressed with the way they approached the activity with curiosity and excitement, and in the end they came up with some really original and creative designs. I thought I’d share a few of their creations.
This scribbling machine had one offset motor up top and another motor touching the ground on the bottom to make circles. The two motors could be turned on independently, creating three unique ways to make patterns.
This fabulous spinner with a cute face took the prize for most extensive use of masking tape.
One of the girls made a stand for the offset motor with another glue stick, a piece of foamie, and a popsicle stick.
It took a while for one of the boys to figure out how to distribute the weight on this one but one he got the motor adjusted, it rotated extremely fast, making beautiful circles.
Sometimes more markers are preferred and even with this technique, it took a lot of adjusting for all of the colors to show up on the drawing.
One of the ways we measure success of an activity is having each final product be both a form of personal expression and somehow reflect the thinking process that the learner took to figure out how to make it work. I think this group of scribbling machines clearly met both of those criteria.
Animation Station has been part of seven OpenMake events by now. Each time we tried new materials, a new table design, label, or facilitation approach. During the last OpenMake – Trash, we added a feature that we had in mind since the beginning of tinkering with stop motion animation. We wrote a new software for the exhibit that allows visitors to keep their movie by uploading it to YouTube right after they finish their work at Animation Station.
A visitor group using the slide-out keyboard to add a title to their movie and send it to YouTube.
The keyboard stays hidden while visitors focus on making their Animation
Our first impression after this OpenMake is that the upload software and the slide-out keyboard worked well, and we heard from a number of OpenMakers that sharing the movie online is a great reward. Further conversations between our software developer Aaron and a group of visitors during OpenMake led to the idea of making the video available on visitor’s smartphones by providing a direct link instead of emailing a link to our Animation Station web page. One of my favorite moments during OpenMake was to see Aaron respond to this suggestion from OpenMakers right away.
Aaron changing the software on the fly to provide a short direct link to the video for folks to type into their phone. Now visitors are literally able to take away their video on their phone minutes after they finished working on Animation Station.
Of course it’s also great for us to be able to watch all the animation movies visitors make. They are a great source of inspiration for new materials and new animation techniques.
“Exploratorium Love” is a new favorite. Kelly shows how to use your hand in the animation to create a magical effect.
“Rocket fly” is just great because visitors sacrificed their veggie snack to add it to the animation. The rocket is powered by bell peppers.
Over the past few open make events, one thing we’ve had on the back burner is finding ways to provide “kits” for people to work on at home after the event. The main project that we have tried has used the make@home egg dispenser machine to give out parts for blinky bugs, scribbling machines, or even DIY potato heads. At open make: trash, issues with hair dryers and irons using up too much power forced us to abandon the plans to accshrink chip bags and experiment with a different way of providing kits for visitors.
It turned out that out in the skylight, with everything else running, every time I plugged in my toaster oven it shorted out the circuit breaker. But since I had everything ready for the activity, I decided to just give away the materials needed to shrink bags (and even the chips inside them) and give people instructions on how to make miniaturized chip bag accessories at home. It turned out to be a pretty good experience after we got over the initial disappointment that they wouldn’t be making something at the museum. It also provided a good chance to talk to visitors and explain the procedure.
I think one reason that it felt fun for visitors is that people usually have all the necessary materials already at their house and just need some inspiration to get started. The only slightly rare elements are earring backs, key chain loops, and pinback materials, and these can easily be salvaged from old unwanted jewelry. With a little more preparation time and the instructions clearly printed out I think that the “kits” might have been an even better plan than the original idea or at least a good supplement. For things like this, where there’s not much “tinkering” that can be done in a short amount of time, giving out the materials and instructions feels pretty interesting and it’s nice to explain the steps in person instead of by the printed instructions that we’ve put in the egg machine. I’d like to see us do this again and try to set-up an easy way for people to share what they’ve made at home and let us know what new techniques they have discovered.
In case you missed my table at open make, here’s the recipe for “shrunken chip bags”
Chip Bag Shrinky Dinks
1 small chip bag emptied of contents (regular kinds like fritos or lays seems to work best but we’ve experimented with all types)
parchment paper
two baking sheets
conventional or toaster oven
oven mitts
jewelery pieces (key chains, earring backs, or necklace chain)
hole punch
Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Lay chip bag flat and place on parchment paper. Fold over parchment so that chip bag is completely covered. Place on the back of a flipped-over baking sheet. Place the other baking sheet on top right-side-up so that the bag is pressed flat between the sheets. Bake in oven for about 15 to 20 minutes. Check often (with oven mitts) to see the progress and adjust time and temperature as needed. Once bag had shrunk to desired size, punch a small hole in the corner and attach to jewelry pieces.
At Open Make: Trash, we tried a new activity called “Water Craft.” In this activity, visitors explore creating a “water craft” that would float on the water, move through the water, or run across the water surface. Water crafts include boats, submarines, and flotsams, but are not limited to them.
As a water container, we used a big water trough. It was a perfect size for visitors to test out their creation and see whether what they made would behave as initially intended. The size of the container also attracted many young children who were more interested in playing with the large amount of water and floating objects than designing water crafts…
The water crafts are usually composed of two separate parts: the water craft body and the water craft “engine.” While the body acts as the main structure of a water craft, the engine enables the water craft to move across the water surface. We had a lot of trash materials, such as plastic containers, yogurt cups, easter egg shells, popsicle sticks, and many others, intended mainly for creating bodies of water crafts. For “engines”, we had different size of rubber bands, paper clips, straws, and beads. One example of water craft engines is a rubber band powered propeller, which is shown in the right photo.
What I particularly enjoyed about this activity was seeing the variety of ideas that visitors came up with in order to give motion to their water crafts. These two brothers (in the photo of bottom right) spent more than one hour on designing their rubber band powered water craft. First, they were playing with a sample of a rubber band propeller to see how it works — winding it up and letting it go.
Then, they started making their own rubber band powered propeller. They attached two bottle caps at a tip of the propeller so it would propel itself through the water. Check this boat in action!
Also, in the video, look at the fin at the bottom of their boat. The fin is there because they noticed the boat would tend to circle without it. With the fin, their boat moved straight forward.
Creations designed by other visitors include rubber band powered paddles, spinning floating objects, water powered boats, balloon powered boats, etc…
The video below shows you a few more examples (some are from a previous try-out workshop before Open Make).
None of the water crafts started out with a perfect mechanism. They all started as very simple structures and without any motion. Then, some of the visitors used the pre-made rubber band motors that we provided, other visitors came up with their own mechanisms through a careful observation of the samples and their creations after many trials and errors.
Making water crafts is not easy. Even with the pre-made rubber band motors, visitors had a hard time to manage the movement of the objects. There were enough moments of frustration, being stuck, and failures in this activity that visitors got discouraged… (and that is where our facilitation became really important!) At the same time, I saw a lot of moments of joy when the water crafts acted as visitors intended. In terms of development of this activity, there is still plenty of things that could be improved, such as the selection of the materials, the setup of the space, the way to scaffold visitors’ learning process so that they could get unstuck from frustrations in meaningful ways. We are still at an early stage of prototyping this activity.
