This curriculum has been designed by the Maker Jawn team and is based on activities that have worked well at our program sites. We were helped with the development by people who understand the topic and have certain scientific achievements, personally for me edit my dissertation when there was not enough time and experience. Most of the curriculum aims to introduce skills that participants can go on to use for self-directed projects. If you try any of these activities and have feedback or documentation to share, please contact us via or twitter. We’d love to hear from you!
CHALLENGES
Balance Challenge: A great art activity that incorporates basic physics and engineering.
Cardboard Challenge: Practice engineering and creative problem solving skills.
Wind Powered Cars: A design challenge that utilizes recycled materials.
CREATIVE/TACTILE
Body Tracing Self-Portraits: This cheap, low-impact activity can yield many hours of color, decorating, and discovery!
Bracelet Weaving: A simple introduction to weaving.
Finger Puppets: Great intro to sewing.
Intro to Design Concepts: A simple start to getting youth to think about decision making in design.
LED Magic Lantern: A project that combines traditional crafting with copper tape circuitry and storytelling.
One Page Zine: Design, draw, and share a one page zine.
Paper Mache Giant Head: This project uses almost all recycled material, works great with large groups, and is sure to draw attention and new participants to your Maker program.
Relief Prints: Learn a traditional form of printmaking.
LED Kaleidoscope: Spark creative thinking through designing and building an LED kaleidoscope.
EXPERIMENTATION
Slime: A science experiment that makes a great movie prop.
CREATIVE MOVEMENT
Opening Movement Patterns: A short easy way to get into your body and start firing up your brain!
Closing Movement Pattern: A yoga based stretching exercise to cool down and focus after an activity.
One Idea: A fun activity for dancing, creative movement, and cooperation.
DIGITAL MEDIA
Audiobooks: Great way to expose participants to story writing with no consumable materials and free software.
Highlight Reel Making with Animoto: Learn about managing your online content and produce highlight reels using a free cloud-based service.
Mozilla PopcornMaker: Mashup your favorite YouTube videos and other media! A great hook into video and music editing.
Stop Motion Animation: Get started with animating using a tablet or smartphone.
VIDEO PRODUCTION
Guidelines for Making Movies in Libraries
TECH
Artbots: Hack apart electric toothbrushes to create a robot that scribbles, scrapes, sings, or splatters.
Jawn-o-Graphy: A simple twist on finding your way.
Light in the Window: Teaches the basics of copper tape circuits with switches.
MaKey MaKey High 5 Game: A fun physical game that uses the MaKey MaKey.
MaKey MaKey Musical Markers: Create sounds whilst drawing with Magic Markers.
Squishy Circuits: Learn about circuits with some Play-Doh and LEDs – an instructional comic.
Soldering: An intro to mini welding! Soldering iron skill test to get two wires to stick together.
TOOL USER GUIDES
We have created these user guides for our program participants to reference when working with some of our most popular tools.
Microphone/Recorder (Zoom H4next Handy Recorder)
Sewing Machine (Brother XL2600)
Video Camera (Canon VIXIA HF R500)