pics from July programs!

I'm playing a bit of catch-up here, as I was sadly neglecting posting pics of the Summer events as they were happening! But here's some of the stuff that went down in July!

On Wed, July 2, 12 teens came to check out the MaKey MaKey Workshop! I've described MaKey MaKey on the blog previously, but simply put, it allows you to hook up anything to your computer and as long as it conducts electricity, the computer will think it's a keyboard button or a mouse button! This allows for some pretty creative contraptions, and I made sure there were lots of various supplies on demand to use, such as chopsticks, tin foil, pennies, marshmallows, bananas and paper and pencils (pencil graphite is a bit conductive, so your drawings can become buttons)! We had a good time using various inputs to play Flappy Bird, Canabalt, and other simple games, as well as using a simple drumming program to make different items play sounds when touched! We'll be doing this program again in August at the Municipal branch.

Using drawings to operate a Dance Dance Revolution game!

On Wednesday, July 23, we had 16 teens show up to throw things out the second story window!! We had an Egg Drop Contest, where everyone got into five small groups and designed contraptions to protect an egg from a two-story fall. They had one hour to build whatever they wanted from the materials given. I was surprised that all five survived the drop!! That's it, next time I'm giving less stuff to use, I want to see some broken eggs here!

The view out the 2nd story window!

parachutes were a popular theme!

On Tuesday, July 29 at the Municipal branch we had a Minecraft Craft day! There were four stations of different Minecraft-related crafts of various difficulty. There were Perler Beads out to make Minecraft-themed necklaces, duct tape, markers and Velcro to make creeper bracelets, papercrafts of various monsters and items from the game, and Minecraft coloring sheets! In addition we had some iPads running the Pocket Edition and my PS3 was running Minecraft projected onto a screen for anyone that wanted to play. Almost everyone made a Perler Bead necklace and papercraft and we all hung out and talked about Minecraft with each other, which was cool.

Finally on Wednesday, July 30th we had 16 teens show up for the Build a Brush Bot program! Using a small motor, a AAA battery, some wire and a glue gun, we made little vibrating bots. (They're close to Hex Bugs, actually). This was a fun program and everyone's bots came out looking a little different!

Here's my example Brush Bot that I made

Summer programming is winding down a little bit for August, but we've still got some cool stuff coming up! As I mentioned, we'll be doing the MaKey MaKey again at Municipal. And we'll also be doing the Minecraft Craft event that took place at Municipal at Sellers on Tuesday! I'm even planning to add one more special papercraft to the event, if you give your Minecraft username, I'll print out a papercraft of your character! We've been doing teen movies every month for the past couple months, and at the end of August we'll have a special screening of Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, a Minecraft documentary by 2 Player Productions. The movie is drop-in, but the other events do require registration, so if you think you'd like to come, be sure to sign up, it may be waiting list only pretty soon!