Maker Faire Educator Meetup: Thursday, May 16, 2013, 4-7pm

Date: Thursday, May 16th, 2013
Time: Open hours will be 4-7pm.
Location: Sequoia Hall at the San Mateo County Expo Center

It's time for YOU to make! Join us for a special afternoon session, hosted by the education team of Maker Media, devoted entirely to educators.

We have a full slate of fun, hands-on activities and projects, meant to get you making, take things home, refine your skills, share project and curriculum ideas, and learn about what other educators are doing with their students and in their classrooms.

What to expect (with much more planned!) --

• Learn how to design and use the laser cutter to create inexpensive instructional materials, manipulatives, and decorations
• Sit down and work with Scratch, MIT's incredible and free programming environment
• Refine your soldering skills with Learn to Solder badges and simple electronics projects
• Dive into paper crafts and automata
• Light up your evening with Squishy Circuits
• Hunker down and learn to sew
• Work with a number of local organizations to create hands-on projects and activites that you can use in your classrooms!

And more! You won’t go home empty-handed.

This event is open to all educators. And there will be food too!

Parking and entrances: Please park in the large parking lot at 1346 Saratoga Drive. Once parked, please enter in through Gate 6. Our managers at Gate 6 will check you in and provide directions on how to get to Sequoia Hall. Thanks!

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We have some fun updates for the Maker Faire Educator Meetup!

We have a growing group of wonderful organizations coming to the Meetup to engage you in Making. These include:

• Full Spectrum Laser
• RAFT
• The Exploratory
• TinkerTags
• ShopBot
• Autodesk
• SCRAP
• and many more!

We're also adding 2 hands-on "Arduino for Educators" workshops during the event. These workshops are specifically designed for educators who want to use Arduino in their classrooms. We will cover installation of the Arduino software on your laptop, and connecting Arduino to various sensors and actuators.

Two workshops of 1 hour each will be offered, one at 4:30 pm and one at 5:30 pm. Topics to be covered, depending on time allowance, may include:

• Installation
• Your first sketch: Blinking the LED
• Your first circuit: Adding an external LED
• Hardware overview: What can you connect to the Arduino, and how?
• Software overview: What can you do in an Arduino sketch?
• Adding multiple LEDs
• Adding a light sensor and make a reactive project
• Adding a speaker and making sound
• Adding a motor
• Communication from Arduino to your computer: How to collect data from a sensor and graph it on your computer

In addition, we will discuss teaching with Arduino: What educational material is available? What would you like to see? What subjects would you like to teach with Arduino?

We will have a small number number of Arduinos to lend during the workshop but prefer you use your own. Please bring an Arduino, or be prepared to buy one at the workshop.

If you can, please bring your own laptop. We will have a small number of laptops to lend during the workshop.