Video
Marble Machines – training with the Explainers
As has become a sort of yearly tradition, we hosted a three-hour training with the new batch of Field Trip Explainers, who will be starting to work on the museum floor in a couple of weeks. This is a particularly fun and creative group to work with: their ideas are always clever, the mood happy, and the insights that transpire in the “debriefing” session afterward always worth listening to and taking note of.
Click on the image below to be taken to a gallery of their work and creations:
And here’s a sweet video of their wonderful contraptions:
Maker Faire 2009 time-lapse
Well, now that it’s over, it’s time to reflect on what an amazing ride Maker Faire was this year.
We organized a 3,600 square feet booth, including exhibits, snack activities, demonstrations, prototypes, and two PIE activities: a giant marble machines fort, and an even bigger enclosure where we let visitors build their portion of a collective chain reaction machine.
Photos from the event are coming soon. In the mean time, enjoy these frantic movies: they are two time-lapse movies, each compressing a full day of chain reaction workshop in less than a minute. You will notice the ebb and flow of visitors, and twice during each movie, the crowd building up to watch us set off the whole reaction, and then us taking it all down and starting again. It makes me tired and happy just looking at it!
Day 1:
Day 2:
The big set-offs were web-cast live on Saturday! You can see the archived versions here:
Chain reaction videos: explainer style!
As promised, here are two videos showing the contraptions built by the explainers during their training with us. Cool stuff!
Tinkering with monks: light exploration video
Once again, two days of exploring light, reflections, mylar, mechanical movement, and caustics exemplified by one particularly playful and delightful final contraption. It’s a disco light!
You can read more about this activity in these posts.
Tinkering with monks: cardboard automata video
Three days of tinkering with Tibetan monks condensed in three minutes of video. Enjoy!
You can read all about the cardboard automata activity, as we implemented with with the monks, in these posts.