Jasmine Florentine's new book introduces making and STEM to middle-schoolers. The book, "Hex Allen and the Clanksmiths", creates a fantasy world where real problems are solved by hands-on skills. Jasmine is driven to help young people understand STEM, not just as a field of study, but as an opportunity to apply their creativity as well as intelligence. She believes if more kids knew what STEM really was, they'd realize it offered something for everyone -- a no-brainer. Jasmine has her BS/MS...

Dorothy Jones-Davis has been Executive Director of Nation of Makers for six years. She recently announced that she is leaving to join the KID Museum in Bethesda Maryland as Chief Impact Officer. In this episode, we talk about how Nation of Makers got started, some of its accomplishments and where it might go. I also asked Dorothy how working in this role has changed her as a person as well as in her career.

Jason Pohl calls himself a "pretengineer" because he's self-taught. Trained as artist, his design work has taken him from creating video games to actually designing and fabricating parts for Orange County Choppers. Jason moved into CAD design and working with CNC machines. He has boundless energy and enthusiasm as someone who is doing what he always wanted to do -- make things that are real. And it just might have been a high school art teacher who pointed him in the direction he would...

Meet the winners of this year's Amazing Maker Awards. Our top winners come from the US and Canada, Turkey, Japan, and Germany and they are as young as 14. Their projects represent social impact, art, technical achievement and education. This is an audio recording of our October 4 Live Showcase in which I talked to our top winners about their projects.

I'd like you to meet Amy Zell - mother, librarian, grief counselor, and maker. In this episode, she talks about the power of making to change things, to change people. She credits Casey Shea, a Sonoma County maker educator with telling her about "maker empowerment" at the Fab Institute in Pittsburgh in 2018. She understood "maker empowerment" to mean the wherewithal to change things through making, and she applied it to her own life to move forward after suffering the loss of her son. Now...

Authors of the new book, Make: Calculus, Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron talk about using Legos and 3D printed models to create visualizations that help anyone learn calculus. After we talk about the book, Joan and Rich show some of the models that demonstrate Lotka Volterra equations, for instance. You might prefer to see that portion as a video, which is available at: https://youtu.be/a0v4fUSFl2U For a transcript and additional info, go to...

Susie Frazier created the Maker Town platform for makers and artists working in Cleveland and Northern Ohio so that more people can find them and learn about what they make. Susie is a maker, creator and artist. Her own journey led her to Cleveland, Ohio, where she began developing her own functional and decorative art, working with stone and then organic materials. She hosted a TV show. Then she wrote a book called "Designing for Wellness." Through the pandemic. Susie realized that many...

A refugee from TechShop in SF, Ryan Spurlock took what he learned there and applied it to a new makerspace called Humanmade located in the design district of San Francisco. Two things stand out about this makerspace. One is how it was funded: a local developer whom the City required to set aside funding for community development worked with Ryan to locate space and build it out. Second, Humanmade has worked with the City of San Francisco to establish a Next Generation Advanced...

Maker Faires are slowly coming back. After not happening for two years, Maker Faire Long Island took place in June at Port Jefferson Village's Explorium. Everybody was happy to come back. said co-producers of Maker Faire Long Island, Angeline Judex and Lisa C. Rodriguez. Angeline is the Explorium's Executive Director and Lisa is in digital media marketing for the science center. They share that with the makers back and families gathered, the magic was back.

Tyler Kerr runs the Innovation Wyrkshop, a makerspace at the University of Wyoming. During COVID, state officials saw the potential for makerspaces in vocational rehab and developing skills in local communities. And so they are funding the build out of a network of makerspaces throughout the state. Tyler and his students set out to build a safety pass, the Maker Access Pass that would allow students to be trained in one makerspace and work with machines in another makerspace. He believes...

Makey Makey, a creative platform for children of all ages, turned 10 years old this month. In this episode, we talk with Jay Silver, the creative technologist behind the platform, and Jay Melican, formerly of Intel who runs the business. Jay Silver talks about creative play and learning, and the community that has grown up around Makey Makey.

DIY lifer Gareth Branwyn has compiled a new volume of his series, Tips and Tales of the Workshop, Volume 2. He joins Dale Dougherty to talk about how he collects tips — asking a person directly to share a tip is not very productive. He shares some of his favorite tips he has found. He talks about the aspirational quality of tips, how picking up an idea from someone can help us become better. Learn more about Frankenstein prototyping, that things aren’t perfect in the vaults of a Gothic...

Julie Darling, author/educator/librarian, talks her book "Social-Emotional Learning Using Makerspaces and Passion Projects: Step by Step Projects and Resources for Grades 3-6". She is a Media Specialist at A2 Steam in Ann Arbor, CA. We talk about getting fidgety kids engaged and excited. She explains that a Makerspace can be a creative place for students and an opportunity to develop social-emotional learning, which are both personal and social skills.

Mike Senese has been the Executive Editor for Make: for almost nine years. He started on volume 36 and leaves now after wrapping up issue 81. Mike joins Dale Dougherty to talk about his experiences at Make: and Maker Faire, as well as working with the maker community. See ya soon, Mike Senese.

Determination seems like the best word to describe the collective response of Ukrainians as they fight for their country, for their home and their freedom. One month ago, I spoke with Yuri Vlasyuk and Svitlana Bovkun who live in Kyiv. That was the day Russia invaded Ukraine. I knew them because they were producers of Maker Faire in Ukraine. I wanted to find out how they are doing and what the maker community was doing during the war. A month later, one month into the war, we talked again to...

You might say that CNC is like a stepchild in the digital fabrication family, not the friendliest or easiest tool to get to know in the maker-space. Yet CNC is not something that most makers should be afraid of, especially as new software allows you to see in simulation what the CNC machine is going to do before you press go. In this episode, I'm joined by Anne Filson and Gary Rohrbacher, co-authors of Design for CNC. Both are professors of Architecture at the University of Kentucky and...

My guest on this episode is Wayne Seltzer who is lifelong fixer himself. He started the U-Fix-It Clinic in Boulder, Colorado to help others learn to fix things. Wayne helped put the "you" in Fixit Clinics, making sure they empowered people to learn to do the repairs themselves rather than having an expert do it for them. Wayne's article in the current issue shares the story of how he started his own repair business one summer in New Jersey. You'll get to know Wayne and his life story from...

Charles Helmholdt of Grand Rapids, Michigan designed and built a Kiddy Copter, based on the Bell 47 helicopter from the M.A.S.H TV series. In this episode of Make:cast, we talk about the how and why to build this ride for kids. What does stand out is that Charles likes to build things and he does it with and for his family. Kiddy Copter first appeared in Make: V76 in a Made on Earth article written by Mike Senese. A companion article to this video is available at:...

William Gurstelle is the author of many popular technical books, including Backyard Ballistics and the three-volume Remaking History. He has been a contributor of projects to Make: Magazine, and currently writes the Remaking History column, which features a historical invention that you can recreate at home. For the last three years, Bill has been enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Minnesota, studying the history of science and technology. The concept of maker's knowledge...

Over nine years ago, Raspberry PI was created by a small team, led by Eben Upton as a kind of academic side project. This single board computer was a PC without a keyboard, a monitor, any kind of enclosure, an inexpensive board that could be connected to power and other USB devices. It was completely open to whatever you wanted to do with. Raspberry Pi has had big impact by going small. For Volume 79 of Make: Magazine, our board's issue, Executive Editor, Mike Senese talked to Eben Upton of...

This preview of Respiracon II (January 29-30) features Robert Read of Public Invention and Leith Greenslade of the Every Breath Counts Coalition. They are starting a conversation around open source medical devices and how makers can work more productively when the next pandemic or other emergency happens. Link to Respiracon II: https://www.pubinv.org/respiracon_ll/

Julie Legault and Dr. Justin Pahara are the Canadian co-authors of "Zero to Genetic Engineering Hero," a hands-on guide to biotech experiments for the classroom, home and makerspace. Justin, a Cree scientist-entrepreneur with a PhD in biotechnology from University of Cambridge, lives on a farm in southern Alberta. Julie is a graphic designer from Montreal and an entrepreneur with a degree from MIT Media Lab. Together they started AminoLabs and wrote this book on experimenting safely and...

FabLab ICC is located at Independence Community College in Independence, Kansas. It's a small town of less than 10,000 people in southeast Kansas. Yet for a town of that size, FabLab ICC with 15,000 sq.ft. of space is large. Jim Correll is the Director of FabLab ICC and Tim Haynes is the Manager. They are my guests on this episode to talk about how their FabLab serves not just students, but also the community at large. Two of their programs are the Food Fab Lab and a Guitar Fab Factory. All...

Making stuff, engaging in some form of material practice, is essential for students who are to become innovators, says Dr. Ann-Louise Davidson. She is an Associate Professor of Education and Concordia University Research Chair in Maker Culture in Montréal, Canada. She is the Director of the Concordia University Innovation Lab. She is also Associate Director of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology and she directs #MilieuxMake, the Milieux makerspace initiative. Her work...

nt State University, the Design Innovation Hub is a central resource on campus that provides makespace access and connects to the other makerspaces on campus. What is unique is its focus on fashion, design and art. In this episode, I talk to J.R. Campbell who is the Executive Director of the Design Innovation Initiative and Andrea Oleniczak who manages the hub. Campbell believes that a makerspace provides the on-ramps and off-ramps for a student to explore their interests outside of major....