Monster Maker from DIY on Vimeo.
Say hello to Trixee, one the makers from DIY.org, the community for kids who make the most amazing stuff and share it with the world. The video above is part of new series of Stories DIY have released featuring some of their favourite makers from around the US. Trixee likes making fabric monsters and wooden rafts, and the other featured makers are into stomp-rockets, stop-motion animation, snowshoes and so much more.
Isaiah from DIY says:
We’ve all seen makers on DIY that make us happy. Their DIY homemade vacuum cleaners and stop-motion special effects leave grins on our face all day. We’ve often wondered to ourselves what these kids would be like if we could go hang out with them. What is DIY like from their kids-eye-view? How would they talk about it? How do they think about it? What are their lives like?
So we sent two filmmakers out across the country to meet a few of these makers – to see their bedroom workshops and backyard labs. As a surprise, I sent some one-off prototypes of our embroidered Skill patches as a special Christmas gift (they are coming soon for everyone else).
The footage that came back was astonishing. Most of the makers could recount the entire history of DIY’s development during the past year, feature by feature. We were also shocked to see that sometimes only a small percentage of their projects made it onto DIY because we hadn’t released a specific Skill. These investigations showed us that the social encouragement and peer-to-peer (kid-to-kid) learning that Makers find on DIY is truly unique and that it keeps them pumped to continue creating. It’s that feeling they have that keeps us pumped to continue creating DIY too.
“Monster Maker” Trixee on DIY.org
It’s fantastic seeing all the cool things these kids are making, and how they’re really enjoying sharing them with everyone on DIY.org. The site itself is going from strength to strength and is ramping up the features – last fall they introduced their ‘Skills‘ section (think of them as merit badges), and they just keep adding more and more of them, it’s hard to keep up. Latest ones include Landscaper, Open Sourcerer, Web Designer and if your kids think of themselves as budding Sherlock Holmes’, then the Detective skill is the one for them.
The social network aspect of the site had taken another step forward too. They’ve had favourites and comments for a while, but now your little makers can follow other little makers around the globe and keep up to date with all of their projects via a ‘stream’, which shows new followers, comments, challenges completed and skills earned.
Join in now and be inspired!
