2017 edition, and finale

There we go, MakerDays 2017 is over. It was a good event from the perspective of the conference. For my part, I held a really fun workshop on the micro controller Arduino and a crash course in component based electronics. This worked out just fine, I had prepared (and even gotten my girl friend to help me out) several kits from our buckets of components as well as some good exercises. Now, this is probably the most challenging workshop we have been giving on the conference, so simplicity is core. I think I managed fairly well, after all I had several groups which I in turn split up into several groups and I got all of them to create little blinking and sensing machines in one hour and thirty minutes. My participants were teachers, so many of them had barley or never even programmed before.

I also took the opportunity to promote the energy efficient behavior project I’m working on, TRIBE 2020. I pretty much had zero material and time to prepare it, so I worked during the night between the two conference days on remaking a roll-up into a TRIBE one. It looked really trashy, but I managed to blame it on being “maker themed”. At least I got the bright idea of projecting the game from TRIBE on the roll-up using a pico projector, with a bit more preparation it could have been awesome. :)

We are going to discuss whether we’ll have a 2018 MakerDays, the general feeling is not though. We feel that we, and other initiatives, have come through to the teachers and educational system in Sweden. We might try new approaches on the subject, and already are touring across the country to motivate teachers ahead of new requirements due to a national curriculum update where programming is required. However, we’ll probably do some other conference or such next year.