Maker Faire: Popsicle Stick Tools!

As you may or may not know, I’ve been working with Amon in EASE lab which does education research and k-12 outreach. Part of my work this summer has been developing an activity that we could implement in a mobile makerspace (aka. trailer) that we could deploy in proximity to ice cream trucks.

Two posts ago, I wrote about what influenced me to pursue engineering, and part of how I got here was the introduction of new tools and technologies during my education. I wanted to fold part of that narrative into my activity, and what I eventually came up with was “popsicle stick tools,” an activity where kids make tools out of popsicle sticks (do I sound redundant?). So far I’ve developed three tools, the protractor, the calipers, and the screwdriver.

If you’re interested the instructions can be found: tinyurl.com/h738yhu

So this past weekend I ran a booth at the Boston Mini-Maker Faire (at the Children’s Museum) with our popsicle stick activity representing Ease Lab and Olin. I had thought this was my first Maker Faire but then I remembered that a few years ago I represented my robotics team at a Kansas City Maker Faire.

Caliper popsicle sticks chilling out after a cut job.

Originally we were having kids cut their own popsicle sticks using wire cutters, they would often forget to wear their safety glasses and splinters from the sticks flew everywhere. After some reconsideration we decided to pre-cut/pre-perforated using the laser cutter so we didn’t have to worry about safety logistics. We used a template acrylic sheet to line everything up to properly laser cut everything. In total I spent about 5 hours cutting out ~300 caliper sticks and ~600 screwdriver sticks.

During setup before the storm

The weather app told me it was going to 95° with scattered thunderstorms on Saturday, instead it was 95° and way too sunny. We were set up under the tent so we were partially shaded but as the sun moved across the sky it slowly encroached on on our station. The Children’s Museum estimated an attendance of around 10,000 people, so I was honestly expecting a monster swarm of kids. We prepared enough materials so that 30 of each tools could be made per hour. Turned out that there was plenty of stuff at the faire to keep everyone occupied, and we had a modest flow of kids coming to and from our tables.

Birds eye view of our booth (we changed configurations to be more shaded).

We had engraving stamps on the table so people could stamp their names into the popsicle sticks to personalize it. We also brought our mini router, so kids could drill holes on the spot. Interestingly the few adults that came to our table were only interested in the router.

Kid using his screw driver to fix Wall-e.

In addition to making the tools we had some “try” stations set up, we had a board with screws that people could screw in, pokemon with angles for people to measure (riding on that pokemongo wave), and a scratch game hooked up to a makey makey that would allow kids to fix a virtual Wall-e using their screwdriver and a hammer.

Sliceform Studios: Vineyards

I ran the morning shift and got to walk around the Maker Faire afterwards. Most of the stuff there was targeted towards kids (not surprising since it was hosted by the Children’s Museum), but I did come across a cool booth called Sliceform Studios, which is a software that generates a laser cut template for beautiful tessellated art pieces. I totally have plans to make my own now.

By the end of the day I was completely pooped. I was hot, sweaty, tired from standing all day, and kind of sick of explaining how to make calipers for the nth time that day (I was also probably the #1 consumer of candy in our booth). I am pretty in awe of people who do this every single day.

A few things I learned from this experience:

• Kids are better at following tutorials when then can easily flip flop between the instructions and their project (so keep the instructions where they are working)
• Your voice will inexplicably jump an octave when you’re helping out a small child
• Using a proper amount of glue is an undervalued skill

Four year olds don't care for your adult insecurities

Eliza activating the button on her Rainbow Dash.

Disclaimer: This is entirely from my own point of view.

Today I met a little girl, let’s call her Eliza, at a go meetup. Her dad was in a large group of go players discussing a professional game, and Eliza was running around the table bugging her dad to pay attention to her. I tried to be interested in the discussion at hand, but the table was long, I was sitting at a distance, the level of discussion was way over my head, and I was getting more and more bored.

“Ni yao wan ma?” I asked her, do you want to play? Eliza reminded me of me. Her parents seem like recent immigrants, and she would switch back and forth from english to chinese. For the first game I did my best to speak chinese, she had difficulties understanding me and as it became clearer that she spoke english perfectly fine, our conversations shifted towards the English spectrum. Truth be told I am very self conscious of my mandarin. Talking to strangers in chinese will usually result in me feeling ashamed, judged, or both. I’d imagine they’re thinking her chinese sucks for someone who’s Chinese. It doesn’t help that I’m constantly translating my cantonese into mandarin. Sometimes there are phrases that feel so wrong translated that I just get stuck mid-sentence unable to continue. Eliza speaks better mandarin than me, Eliza is four.

Eliza was also unsurprisingly good at go. You could see that she played purely by instinct. She took less than no time to respond to my moves, and I had to concentrate hard to not get caught up in her pace. Give her a few more years and I feel like she would easily surpass the players on the table next to us. I say she’s unsurprisingly good because I could imagine (my hypothesis gathered from evidence between the three of our interactions) her and her dad at home playing hours and hours of games, quiet except for his stern lecturing on her mistakes. On one hand that’s probably why she’s so good, on the other it feels kind of crushing. I’m no child prodigy but I feel like the pressure that comes from the heavy expectations of your parents easily smushes the fun out of anything. It reminds me of going to piano classes when I was younger. I don’t remember any of the details but I do remember hating practising, hating the piano, and quitting before I got anywhere near good. My socialization tells me I should condemn this sort of parenting, but part of me believes that this is how the 0.01% is created.

Genius aside, she is still just four, during my turns (her breaks), she would take the broken stones (she called them “the bad guys”) out of the container and quarantined them to the side of the board. During one turn she wanted to show me her Rainbow Dash’s song (which was activated by a button in her chest). It was hilarious... for the next two minutes it looked like she was strangling her plushie trying to activate this button. I was impressed by how much play she incorporated into what people usually consider *scrunches up face* a serious game. However you could feel the playful mood change whenever the adults decided to look over. It went from our whimsical nonsensical chatter to a quiet silence punctured only by their commentary. And of course I can’t help but feel bad too. Here I am playing with a four year old that’s almost as good as me, and all I can feel is silent judgement from her dad about how terrible I am at go and how shitty my chinese is.