My family and I very much enjoyed our Pi Day excursion to Make: Day at the Science Museum of Minnesota. A collaboration between Twin Cities Public Television (home base of the outstanding Make: Television program) as well as Make Magazine and the Science Museum, the event showcased a ton of local makers and their projects.
I’m sorry to say my youngest two kids — 3 and 4.5 — had never been to the Science Museum before, so we spent a bit of time checking out the museum’s other exhibits. Our favorite, Water describes every facet of this important resource. You get to the exhibit by passing through a fantastic, illuminated curtain of mist — my son very much enjoyed running through the mist until he bonked heads with another little boy who was doing the same.
Our main purpose for visiting, however, was to check out the amazing (and mostly locally produced) geekery that comprised the Make: Day festivities. Here were some highlights:
• Studio Bricolage Paint Pendulum. Kids got to work a model airplane yoke which controlled paint dispensed from 2-liter bottles swinging from a 3-story cable!
• John Park’s solarbots. He had two, scurrying around a box, with some vaguely creepy doll heads observing the situation… to see what I mean, look at the photo above.
• The St. Thomas Experimental Vehicle Team answered a lot of 4-year-old questions with good humor, earning themselves a small, inquisitive fan.
• Savage Aural Hotbed‘s found-object music, including some awesome PVC didgeridoos. The band sported identical orange jumpsuits and put on a great performance.
By all accounts the event’s turnout was awesome — it attracted about 5,500 attendees, or about a thousand more than a typical Saturday. Hopefully the hubbub will induce the movers and shakers to make this an annual event.
(Maybe next year the #tcmaker guys will be able to smuggle in their spoonapult?)
Check out Make: Day on Flickr to see a lot of great photos of the event!
(Photo credit: John Baichtal)
