Great Weekend at Maker Faire Orlando 2014
We had a terrific time showcasing our projects and programs at Maker Faire Orlando September 13 & 14, and making new maker friends!. It's always wonderful to see the amazing things people are making and doing, in their garages, in makerspaces, in libraries, in...
Thank You, Hillsborough County!
It with great gratitude that we recognize Hillsborough County for their generous support of ROBOTICON Tampa Bay 2014 and Gulf Coast MakerCon 2015, through EDI2 Economic Development grants. Hillsborough County recognizes the added academic and long term career value...
The Hive Comes Alive and a Library Moves Forward
The journey to bringing the John F. Germany Library makerspace to life - a space now known as The Hive - has been a bumpy and sometimes complicated one, as new and untried journeys can be. It can be hard to create something no one's seen before, in an institutional...
The New Feminism: Women who Make Things
They worked as riveters, buckers, sanders, welders, crane operators, bus drivers, uniform makers, bullet makers, parachute folders, clerical workers, assembly line workers, Red Cross and so much more. They were teenagers, young adult to senior citizens. They came...
Apparently We're Easy to Distract
"Duas tantum rex anxius optat, panem et circensus." ( "The people long eagerly for two things - bread and circuses.") Juvénal If you're online for more than five minutes a day, or have caught mainstream news anytime over the last week, you probably already recognize...
Cocoa Farmers of the Ivory Coast: Reflections on Awareness
For us westerners chocolate is just one more thing. It's inconsequential. We like to eat it, sometimes we get delighted by it for a minute. ... We don't think about it and the incredible effort and resources that are required to make it. We take it for granted along...
Making it at the Library with TBLC
We had a great time meeting with a terrific group of forward thinking Tampa Bay Library Consortium members today, at the Bruton Memorial Library in Plant City, who came out for our Creative Programming for the 21st Century Library workshop. About 20 librarians,...
You Gotta Dream Big
Life is short and you need to do what you wanna do, what you have a passion for… The thing is you gotta dream big and that’s all there is, you just gotta dream big... Ritch Branstrom While on a trip to the Upper Peninsula in Michigan recently, we stayed at a little...
The Power of Tinkering
Tinkering is a minor risk taking activity without any great consequence; it is not goal directed nor are there defined outcomes. There are no key performance indicators for tinkering. Thus, tinkering is suspended from the pressures of defined goals and time limits....
Help us Obi Wan: Why Science needs Science Fiction
There's a very interesting dialectic between science and science fiction. If you take a look at, for example, Edwin Hubble, the greatest astronomer of the 20th century, he was destined to be a Missouri country lawyer. He remembered reading Jules Verne as a child. As a...
Instructables Nation
The community that now calls the site home, is an amazing mix of wonder from around the world. Every day we continue to be amazed by the imagination, curiosity, and simple awesomeness of everyone who shares their creations with us on Instructables. The Instructables,...
Reality Based Living: Ask the Hard Questions & Follow the Evidence
I want to know that it's real, that it's not just something happening inside my own head, because it matters what's true... Neil DeGrasse Tyson In a recent opinion piece titled, "Rhapsody in Realism," New York Times columnist David Brooks talks about the value of the...
The Eureka! Factory, a trademark of Willingham Associates LLC, is a collaborative of creative individuals and business partners who believe in the power of community driven innovation to help people move from passive consumption to empowered and active creation of their future and ours.
