Makerspaces, libraries and education

How to rebuild the self-efficacy of students everywhere.

While In college I learned about engineering in a makerspace. I learned how to communicate in a makerspace. I learned how to organize people in a makerspace. But it took a year of operating a mobile makerspace to realize the true value of these environments.

Desktop Metal, a Cambridge, MA-based 3D printing startup, announced it raised $14m in a first round of funding.

Backers included New Enterprise Associates, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Founder Collective, Lux Capital, and Bolt.

Founded nearly two-months ago by CEO Ric Fulop, Desktop Metal aims to build a clean 3D printing that works with aluminum and titanium. The company currently has 10 employees but does not have neither a web site (it will be probably found at http://www.desktopmetal.com/) nor a prototype.

PocketLab - the wireless sensing and analytics platform for science experiments. A portable, inexpensive, and easy-to-use science laboratory for students, educators, and citizen scientists.

PocketLab connects with a single button to a smart phone, tablet, or Chromebook and instantly streams measurement data that you can see and record. PocketLab measures acceleration, force, angular velocity, magnetic field, pressure, altitude, and temperature. Using our cloud software, you can easily analyze your data, create graphs, and integrate your data with other software. PocketLab has the same features as lab equipment that costs thousands of dollars but is low cost and intuitive to use.

From a distance, it looks as though an alien craft has landed on Beijing. Massive, white, and luminous, the mysterious structure is both beautiful and spooky.

How have you used littleBits in the past?  What’s worked best?
At the core of my philosophy of a school library is the whole idea of creating a participatory culture.  I always strive to provide as many opportunities as possible for my students to do something productive while in the space.  I feel that school libraries should not only provide access to information, but they should provide that same access to tools and resources that allow our students to invent, tinker, create and learn. The Maker Movement has provided the opportunity for our students to move from consumption to creation and to turn their knowledge into action.  My library has a makerspace in it and one of our ‘fixed’ stations is a littleBits bar.  At this bar, we have all kinds of Bits for students to use all throughout the school day.  Our makerspace is an informal learning space, so what worked best for us in giving the students the opportunity to explore and create freely.  littleBits has been an amazing part of our student-driven space and has given students the opportunity to explore their passions, with littleBits being the tool to take them to places only their imaginations dreamt of before.

After a successfully funded Kickstarter, the Analog Voltmeter Clock is now in stock and ready to ship! The Voltmeter Clock uses dual analog meters to tell time

Wouldn’t it be great if new organs could be printed out and used in surgical operations to save people’s lives? As it turns out, a group of Carnegie Mellon researchers have managed to do almost precisely this, producing models of a variety of human organs and body parts using a hacked 3D printer bought off the shop shelves. The new research, published in the journal Science Advances, demonstrates that it is possible to replicate the heart through 3D printing.

“3-D printing of various materials has been a common trend in tissue engineering in the last decade, but until now, no one had developed a method for assembling common tissue engineering gels like collagen or fibrin,” said TJ Hinton, a graduate student in biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and lead author of the study, in a statement.

So that's it. Oogoo is corn starch and clear silicone caulk mixed together and then molded by hand or by forms to create just about anything you can imagine that needs to be adhesive initially and solid yet flexible when cured.

Pennsylvania State University is opening a new exploration lab designed to foster student creativity and inventiveness.

The "Invention Studio" will be located in the Penn State Knowledge Commons on the University Park campus and open to all of the university's students, faculty and staff members. The university is creating the studio in partnership with littleBits, a company that makes simple electronic building blocks that will be available in the studio for people to use.