May marks the one-year anniversary of the MakerBridge blog! While the site did exist before the blog, our blog has become a major part of our efforts to spread the word about making and its intersections with education and diversity and a host of good stuff. In honor of our birthday, I wanted to seize this opportunity to highlight some of our most popular posts from the past year. Without further ado:
Makerspaces in Academia
Makerspaces, coding/programming, and DIY activities are quickly gaining traction and momentum in mainstream culture. As more people become interested in making and hacking, places with the space, equipment, staff to assist in these endeavors and to encourage collaboration and sharing between makers, become necessary. Public libraries in particular have been quick to recognize this need and step up to provide these services to their communities. While public libraries all over have started makerspaces/hackerspaces, academic libraries seem to be less vocal or even visible in the maker movement as a whole. Below, I exhibit a few of these spaces as they exist in academia…
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Books For Educators Interested In Starting A Makerspace
This week, I’ve been reading The Makerspace Playbook: School Edition. It’s full of great information and ideas for anyone looking to start a makerspace, and I fully recommend it. One of the best parts (besides the fact that it’s free) is that it keeps recommending other books and resources for more information. Those recommended titles have topics ranging from pedagogy, to how to lay out your space, to how to choose what tools to acquire, to all kinds of other useful information for anyone who’s looking to set up their own makerspace.
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Guest Post: A Makerspace On A Budget
A few weeks ago, the Makerbridge Twitter feed got a query about how to start a low-cost makerspace. That’s really up our alley here at the University of Michigan School of Information, where our Michigan Makers project partners graduate student mentors with middle school makers.
A few months ago, YALSA asked Rachel Goldberg, the faculty mentor for the East Middle School side of the partnership, to write about it, and they’ve kindly granted us permission to reprint it here.
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Maker Culture At The MLibrary Festival Of Learning
While considering what to write about for this week’s blog post, I stumbled across an event happening right on the University of Michigan campus where I work. Even more interesting, this event–the Festival of Learning–was planned and hosted by the campus library. I am always eager to see how academic libraries are incorporating maker culture, so I stopped by a few of the sessions to explore.
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The Fear of Breaking Things
In the time since I left you to ponder the etymology of anions and cations, and how that relates to anodes and cathodes, I have continued working my way through The Arduino Projects Book. I built myself a simple circuit with a switch, a series circuit with a switch, and a parallel circuit with a switch. Then I moved over to the actually interesting projects, and right away I ran into something that left me confused. Suddenly, without explanation, the circuits I’m instructed to build are putting the resistors on the cathode side of the LEDs I’m lighting up, instead of the anode side like they were before. Does order not matter?
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As I said in our very first post, we’re always up for topic suggestions and guest posts! If you’d like to see *your* writing featured in next year’s edition of our top posts, give us a shout in the comments, drop a note in the MakerBridge forums or catch us on Twitter.
Whether you’ve been with us from the start, or you’re just joining us now–we’re glad you’re here! Here’s to an awesome year of makers and making. And many more!
Image Credit: Birthday Cake by Theresa Thompson
