Make:cast

I met Dr. Steve M. Potter at Maker Faire Atlanta, which was hosted by Georgia Tech, where Dr. Potter was a professor of neuroengineering. His experience at Maker Faire led him to take a maker sabbatical and explore makerspaces around the world. He has written a book for educators, "How to Motivate Your Students to Love Learning". The book emphasizes engaging students in real-world problems. In this conversation, we explore how Steve became a scientist, maker and teacher.

Make: Education Forum - https://make.co/educationforum
"How to Motivate Your Students to Love Learning" book - https://stevempotter.tech/my-book/

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A tool roll is a way to store all kinds of things that you might want to carry with you. Parker Thomas has created a customizable toll roll called the Tego Adventure Kit and it more kit than an end product. You can decide which kind of pouches or pockets suit you and what you want to carry with you. In this episode, Parker shares how this idea came to him, how he got it made and how he cultivated a community around it that added to his original idea and helped make the product better.

Kickstarter: Tego Adventure Kit - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tashtego/tego-roll-and-go-travel-bag?utm_medium=article&utm_source=dale&utm_campaign=

Transcript and photos: https://makezine.com/2021/08/12/making-customizable-tool-rolls/

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Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron, authors of Make: Geometry, explain how to use 3D models to teach geometry, which can help students visualize and grasp the basic shapes. Joan describes herself as a recovering rocket scientist who worked at JPL. Rich was an early RepRap 3D printer enthusiast. Together they have created a practical, hands-on approach to teaching geometry. Make: Books editor, Patrick DiJusto talks to Joan and Rich.

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My guest is Victor Hwang, who organized the Right to Start movement that seeks to open doors for more people to become entrepreneurs and create an ecosystem in America that supports entrepreneurial activity. After many years leading entrepreneurship efforts at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Victor started his own organization built around the belief that becoming an entrepreneur is a fundamental right that anyone can exercise. In this episode, we talk about the four-decade decline in entrepreneurial activity in the US, how the pandemic has caused a spike in new businesses and why it can be a good time to get started. He also talks about a policy proposal that 5% of economic development funds, which usually go to support large companies, be instead redirected to supporting entrepreneurs. America -- and the world -- needs more people who try, who experiment, who start something that didn't already exist.

https://www.righttostart.org/

Transcript: https://makezine.com/2021/07/27/the-5-solution-for-right-to-start/

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Debra Daun's superpower is fixing broken machines, such as 3D printers. She runs the MakerLab at Joliet Junior College in Joliet, Illinois. She has figured out that she can get used and abused machines that have been returned to Amazon. She bids for them at auction and then repairs them or adds the odd parts to her boneyard. She's been able to add more machines that she uses to teach students 3D printing in the makerspace. The more broken the machine, she says, the happier she is.

Photos and transcript available at: https://makezine.com/2021/07/19/fixing-broken-machines-from-the-amazon-return-bin/

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Lydia Sloan Cline is the author of Fusion 360 for Makers, which is out in a new second edition. She teaches 3D design and fabrication at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, where she began as a drafting professor with a degree in Architecture. Patrick DiJusto, Make: Books editor, interviews Lydia in this episode. They talk about using generative design, a way of telling software what you to build and have it present you with multiple design options. She also talks about how 3D printing first came into the community college where she taught drafting and how it became an aid for students visualizing objects. She encourages her students to learn 3D design and thinks it can be valuable for anyone to learn.

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In 2020, Dr. Andreea Gorbatai and two co-authors published a research paper in the journal Organization Science titled: "Making Space for Emotions: Empathy, Contagion, and Legitmacy's Double-Edged Sword." It's about the maker movement and what holds it together. It turns out, it's not skills and tools as much as it is emotions and empathy -- they are the glue for community.

Dr. Gorbatai is a professor in the management department at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Growing up in Romania, she is a sociologist by training and she is particularly interested in studying "new forms of organizations and organizing." Her "Making Space for Emotions" paper looks at how a new field of endeavor starts with a core community and then struggles to maintains its connections and coherence as it grows. As it becomes more popular or recognized, a process called legitimation, more people are exposed to it and the community grows but at the expense of losing some of its less coherence. This is the double-edged sword that the paper refers to.

Her own interest in the maker movement led her to use it as a case study. She wondered what role Maker Faire played in maintaining those connections in the community and inviting more people to understand makers and participate. She believes that having a shared emotional experience is what connects people to each other and the community. "What happens at Maker Faires that revitalizes the maker community and brings people together into a shared maker identity?" was one of her research questions. Her answer is that being a maker is less about credentials and accomplishments and more about how you feel about yourself, your projects and the stories that you share with others who realize, in turn, that they have stories of their own to share.

Link to research paper: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/orsc.2020.1387

Transcript: http://www.makezine.com/2021/07/01/emotion-and-empathy-are-glue-for-makers/

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In episode #22 of Make:cast, I learn about the new building for Fab Lab Tulsa from its Executive Director, Nathan Pritchett. The new building is under development and scheduled to open in 2022. The project had started well before COVID-19 but has stayed on track even during the pandemic. Overall, the future of Fab Lab Tulsa is bright. "I'm just really bullish on the future of fab labs and maker spaces," said Nathan. Tulsa has a lot of talent in the community but the makerspace needed more resources to keep up. "We started looking at what the right size facility would be for us and for our community," said Nathan.

See more at https://makezine.com/2021/06/07/making-and-thinking-big-in-tulsa/

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Like many of us during Covid-19, Benjamin Cabé was baking sourdough bread at home in France. He wondered how he might tell if his dough was done proofing. He began working on an artificial nose that uses physical sensors to detect gas but also uses machine learning to identify the smell. His project is on the cover of Make Magazine, v 77. In this conversation, we talk about how his nose works, how it knows what it does and the limits of what it knows.

Links:

About Make Magazine - Vol 77 - https://makezine.com/2021/05/05/announcing-make-vol-77-machine-learning-and-more/

Buy Make Magazine - Vol 77 - https://www.makershed.com/products/make-magazine-volume-77-print

How Burnt food smells - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.728.1596&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Artificial Nose - Github Repo - https://github.com/kartben/artificial-nose

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CO2 Tech Guru Guido Burger from Germany joins Dale Dougherty to explain his research into monitoring CO2 and show how to build his CO2 traffic light, which can warn if the level of CO2 is rising. We look at how CO2 sensors work as we go through the hardware and software that make up a CO2 device and graph the data it produces. These are devices that students can learn to build and create a full-featured Internet of Things application.

The CDC recently updated its understanding of the transmission of COVID-19 to focus on spread through aerosols, which are exhaled by people and can be circulated in the air. Larger droplets will fall to the ground, which is why the CDC guidelines emphasized social distancing and masks and avoiding contact. However, these aerosols are much smaller and are airborne much longer. When people gather indoors, proper ventilation is needed to move fresh air into the room and disperse the aerosols.

Monitoring CO2 indoors can be used as an indicator or marker for proper air ventilation. CO2 devices provide information that allows you to take actions to be safe and reduce your risk of exposure to COVID-19. While you can buy commercial CO2 devices, you can build them and deploy them to measure the accumulation of CO2 in a confined space.

A YouTube video of this conversation is available at: https://youtu.be/SZoBHfus1Y8.
You can also find a companion article on the Make: website: https://makezine.com/2021/05/17/the-what-how-and-why-of-co-monitoring/

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