Teen Maker Craft Day Extravaganza
A.K.A: Generikat gets thrown to the DIY wolves
Once a year the board comes to each library branch in our district and our manager must present a board report. It's kind of like a Power Point presentation on the state of our library and what we did for the community over the past year since the last board report. I have a new manager, and this was her first presentation to the board. To make things more fun, Youth Services at the mother ship branch scheduled a teen maker craft program to take place during the board report time, and on top of that bit of over-scheduled joy we found out the repair guy was coming at the same time to fix our broken handicap access doors. Yay!
Makerspaces have been a big buzz word in the library realm for the last few years, and today's maker craft extravaganza for teens reflected that focus on providing patrons with tools, supplies, and space so that they might create. I'm totally cool with the concept, and had no issues with the steampunk jewelry craft, turning old t-shirts into bags, and feeding youth chili cream cheese dip and tortilla chips. Great fun.
A library makerspace is an area and/or service that offers library patrons an opportunity to create intellectual and physical materials using resources such as computers, 3-D printers, audio and video capture and editing tools, and traditional arts and crafts supplies.
The soldering kits however were a bit more challenging. We were supposed to let the teens make cell-phone chargers constructed out of Altoid boxes, a 9V battery, a circuit, and a USB cell phone plug. It actually could have been a cool project, certainly not something that I would recommend plugging a $600 dollar phone into, but even beyond that hang up there was one big glaring problem. Not one of us had soldered a thing ever. So here we were, thirty minutes before program commencement and my manager comes to me and says,
I walk back to the teenage volunteer that was manning the station. She looked about as overwhelmed as a minnow in a shark tank and just handed the solder iron to me in silence.
"You are supposed to attach this piece here and this piece there." She replied in a fair amount of exasperation.
"Hmm," I replied, "It probably would have been better to have a class on how to solder before actually trying to make a project doing so, huh?"
In a couple of minutes I had attached the wires and had a complete circuit that was lighting up, but I wasn't feeling to great about turning over the station to a bunch of young people. Our Youth Services person felt the same. While I was doing a crash course on soldering, she had looked up the actual project that we were supposed to do. There were over three thousand comments warning of the potential dangers of that particular homemade cell phone charging project.
However, I really liked the soldering iron, and think that we should totally have a class at the library on how to use one properly. There is something fulfilling about attaching metal to metal with fusible alloy and watching your completed circuit light up. It would just be nice to somewhat know what we are doing before we actually are required to show others how to do so.
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My goodness, that is a joyous occasion filled with all your favorite friends, haha.
Btw, those t-shirt bags look fantastic!
Thinking of marketing them here on Steemit?
Oh yes, there was joy today, lol!
A space cat bedecked with a Steemit eye patch bag to share with others would be super awesome. Me thinks I will do some doodling and pondering about such things! You are the coolest @lydon.sipe! Thank you!
Perfect!
I look forward to these doodlings and ponderings from a cool cat such as yourself.
You're most welcome!
Interesting post and good for you for trying.
Thank you times two! 😊 It was really kinda fun!
Good for you for at least trying to do the soldering!
LOL! Well, I spent hours upon hours watching my Papa weld farm equipment growing up, figured it was kinda the same principle!
I've watched my husband do it. I think under the circumstances you were under, I'd give it a try, too. But, making the bags out of t-shirts would probably work better for me!
The t-shirt bags were pretty fun! I've been trying to dive in a do more things that I have been content to watch others do over the years, be more competent and such, and the solder that dripped onto my finger didn't burn too bad. 😜
Love the GK SpaceBag. And the added Steemit eyepatch is the bigs! Probably good to forgo the hot soldering iron. If nothing else, besides the obvious scortches and burns, seems there might be a few 'Billy+ Becky hearts etched into the library tables. Then again, I should probably give your youthful library patrons a bit more credit than that. Just burned fingers then.
More practice and time for a short course would be good.
I agree with @lydon.sipe, some sort of bag would be a huge sell on the site. Particularly if they had a hep, space Kat on the front with pirate patch. Yaarg. Goferit.
Why thank you for the GK spacebag compliment! I was just thinking about getting a steemit logo eye patch made to wear sometimes at the library, but both you and @lydon.sipe seem to think the bags would be golden. Hmmm... I am still pondering, but! I have to leave at 8am for a journey of another kind, so I will ruminate upon spaced out textiles upon my return!
The soldering will happen! I am still snickering about the Billy and Becky alloy hearts, that totally would have been a thing, lol!!
haha - I laughed out loud at the retreat to T-shirt bags. That's always a good backup plan, I bet. A soldering gun is such a useful tool. I've used them to repair broken plastic laundry baskets -- and for electronics, too, lol. They are one step safer than a propane torch! :O