Make:cast

A lot of makers struggle to learn CAD. Why is this keystone piece of software such a challenge to learn? This is what I talk about with Jake Sugden and Josh Manley, who are the teachers of CAD Class at cadclass.org. Jake and Josh met at Urban Workshop in Costa Mesa, California, a professional makerspace where they had a lot of opportunity to see people struggling to learn CAD. They have put together an online 12-week class for those who want to learn CAD along with others.

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Microsoft's Bryce Johnson and John Helmes Join Make: Editor Caleb Kraft to talk about creating adaptive devices that can be customized, hacked and modded easily by makers using 3D printers as well as the people with disabilities who use them. Bryce Johnson works at the Inclusive Tech Lab at Microsoft who is one of the co-inventors of the Xbox Adaptive Controller and the Surface Adaptive Kit. John Helmes is an industrial designer at Microsoft who began creating and customizing devices for his daughter, Jara, who has cerebral palsy to help her interact with a PC. His work has led to Microsoft Adaptive Accessories, which allows users to adapt devices using 3D printed parts. Make: editor Caleb Kraft has his own side project, The Controller Project, that he and volunteers around the world 3D print accessories for free for people to be able to game. Bryce, John and Caleb have a fascinating conversation about how these capabilities are changing lives.

Links

Microsoft
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/controllers/xbox-adaptive-controller
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/accessible-adaptive-devices-accessories

Other organizations:
www.makersmakingchange.com
Ablegamers.com
www.thecontrollerproject.com
Specialeffect.org.uk

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The world needs more maker microfactories and I wonder if Santa might be interested in learning more about them from Tim Keller, the head of Inventopia in Davis CA, my guest on this episode.

A maker microfactory is a kind of makerspace that focuses on the needs of startups and individual entrepreneurs who are creating prototypes for a business. Keller started Inventopia because he wanted such a space to work. Now, with his proximity to UC Davis, he offers space and equipment for all kinds of startups, particularly in bio-manufacturing for food and medicine.

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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 from MIT in in Mechanical Engineering. She's worked at FIRST Robotics designing play fields for robotic competitions. She lives in Israel but will be moving soon.

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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.

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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 follow. She told him that all the things around him have been designed by someone and he could be that person.

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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.

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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 she works with others who have experienced loss and trauma and she is weaving making into mental health practices. Frankly, I don't want to summarize her story here because you should really hear it from her.

I can't think of a better way to explain to educators and parents how making changes lives than to hear Amy tell her moving story in her own words. For this conversation with Amy Zell, which took place this summer, I was joined by Casey Shea.

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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 https://makezine.com/article/education/a-better-way-to-learn-calculus/

Make: Education Forum link: https://make.co/educationforum/

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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 people who made things were struggling to sell them and she wanted to help people find them. Susie Frazier wants to foster a local maker economy where makers are found and valued by members of their own community.

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