Maker Faire Detroit: Kid friendly

Organizers had planned many areas specifically targeted to kids, and they seemed to be having a great time.

The Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum had a great tent full of interactive exhibits and such for children, old and young.  Here’s a musical instrument played by placing the hand within a certain distance range of some proximity sensors mounted in the base of the unit.  We convinced the inventor to perform it for us.  He works for the museum as an exhibit developer.

You can see the insides of the proximity organ, made of a disassembled keyboard, an Arduino Mega (we saw quite a few of these in the wild, actually) and some relays for controlling the LEDs.

This thing had some serious popularity among the younger generation.  It’s a pedal-powered generator driving an electric fan, which blows air through racquetball racquets immersed in bubble solution, spraying tiny bubbles near and far, depending on how fast of a person you could find to pedal.

Several tents  had tables covered with electronics and tools, and folks encouraging and helping people to come up and just start taking things apart, to see what’s going on inside.

We found many children at this large foam power-boat-making station.  A little pool stood to the left for testing them out.

This huge sculpture / playground thing would periodically spew enormous fireballs from what should probably be called its mouth, but that didn’t seem to dissuade even the smallest children from climbing all over it (below the neck, at least).

The Lifesize Mousetrap took some time to prepare, and always seemed to have a huge crowd gathered around it when it looked like anything was happening at all.  It seemed to take almost the entire hour between each launch to reset the thing.

Just after a show, the crowd dispersed a bit, and it became possible to get a better look at the mechanism.

Two days of having a safe dropped on you tends to take its toll.

By the museum, with a large line, you could find a swing where a solenoid-actuated waterfall with different patterns of drops would cascade a varying sheet of water down on the users, who were swinging through it.  The heat exceeded our expectations both days, and if it weren’t for an air-conditioned museum, we’d expect the line for this would have been around the block.

In the MakerShed tent, they had set up a pretty serious solder tutorial workshop that seemed packed the entire time, both days.  Everyone seemed to be having a great time.  I hope they kept track and can tell us how many people learned.

A bunch of folks from TOOOL (The Open Organization of Lockpickers) had a great lockpicking workshop.  We joined them rather late in the Faire (Sunday afternoon) and they explained how much damage the picking process will do to locks.  While a key can open a lock thousands of times after being picked (say) 50 times, the internal mechanism can be so damaged that the lock cannot even be opened by a key.  We had mixed luck trying to pick a variety of instructive sample mechanisms and padlocks, but of course we attribute our failure to the sorry state of the locks after being picked so many times.  We really enjoyed talking with people so obviously enthused about picking locks, and have considered taking it up as an instructive hobby.

What’s a gathering of humans without a storm trooper to keep them in line?  This representative of the 501st walked the lot outside, and they had a large booth indoors.  I can’t imagine what it must be like inside that suit.

Wearing the Monster Shoes, you could stomp around and paint (via stencil) various footprints on the asphalt.