A Raspberry Pi Insect
It was good as always to see so many of our old friends there showing their stuff including Ragworm, Pimoroni, and a number of Hackspaces that made this Mini Maker Faire come alive! The highlights for me included the 'Human Fire and Ice Show' made from recycled parts, demonstrating what can be made from end-of-life products, and the ever popular marble run got a major upgrade, with a new cnc-milled version. Having live Twitter feeds displayed on several screens all across the Mini Maker Faire was a really nice touch.
Human Fire and Ice Show
We are proud to sponsor our local Maker Faire where we were showing off the new BBC micro:bit, and challenging even more people to our 'Simon Says' interactive game. It is a large version of our Game Project Kit and we were delighted to see a winner, who managed to successfully match the 16 colour sequence within the allotted 10 seconds! His prize for winning the game was a free Game Project Kit so he can recreate his own Simon Says game.
Simon Says Memory Game (far left) (image courtesy of Dominic Morrow)
As we were so focussed on the BBC micro:bit this year, we dedicated our entire stand to showing it off. We took along a couple of PCs for visitors to have a go at coding it for themselves (just like the setup we had last month in the Leicester Space Museum's Creator Faire) to see what they could create. We were very impressed with the coding skills of the students. Many have already been learning the basic programming language 'Scratch' in their ICT lessons. This was useful as the BBC micro:bit can be programmed in the 'Microsoft Block Editor' language which was based on Scratch. The results were impressive. All of the students that took part all managed to code the BBC micro:bit to say their name and a couple more advanced students managed to create their own games using the BBC micro:bit.
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