“I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it’s science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent — to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.”

—President Barack Obama at the National Academies of Science (April 27, 2009)

The Maker movement is spreading, and MAKE and Otherlab have teamed up to advance the creation of “makerspaces” nationwide with the Makerspace program. They’ve developed a Maker Club Playbook for the Young Makers program and a Makerspace Playbook (still in draft form) for building a public spaces for making, along with a comprehensive materials list. And the Maker Faire produced an interesting report on “Innovation, Education, and the Maker Movement,” highlighting the promises and opportunities for making in education. 

     

We really like the idea of “plussing sessions” outlined in the playbooks:

Plussing sessions provide an opportunity for project teams to share their ideas, progress, challenges, and next steps with the participants in the program on a monthly basis. (Plussing is a termed used at Pixar to mean “finding what’s good about an idea and making it even better”).…

Here are a few of the kinds of questions you might get during these sessions:
  • What is your project vision?
  • What inspired you to pick this project?
  • Do you know of other people who have done projects similar, or is this one-of-a-kind?
  • What other project ideas have you toyed with?
  • What kinds of projects have you built in the past?
  • What do you think the hard parts are going to be? What are the easier parts?
However, we must register at least some apprehension about the fact that the Makerspace project is “supported by an award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” creator of the Total Information Awareness Program (official seal, no joke: an eye in a pyramid casting a beam over the entire world) and a wide variety of baroque and terrifying sci-fi weapons technologies, including “Sonic Projectors” that can beam a sound into people’s heads so only they hear it, hypersonic missiles that can blow up anything in the world in an hour, robotic drone killing machines, and ray-guns, like one Fast Company recently described as a “drone-slaying war laser.” District 9 director Neill Blomkamp’s video below may be a fictional advertisement, but it’s not far off from the way the people at the top of DARPA (or General Electric, for that matter) think. It’s a dark and frightening satire that should make us take note of the context in all this robotics funding:
 

From GE’s Defense Products page, “delivering advantage to today’s warfighters,” “for the toughest mission applications”: 

Cool robots!

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