We’ve been busy doing lots of interesting maker stuff lately and we’ve recently joined forces with Carlos Izsak to offer Makercarts for Libraries and Museums.
We’ve been collaborating on various projects over the last 12 months but this means that Carlos has now joined Artefacto to lead on various maker education projects and help us provide pop-up makerspaces and maker workshops to cultural sector organisations.
Carlos developed the project a couple of years ago with the aim to lower the barriers of entry into Maker Education by providing a cost effective, space-saving curated set of technology. The Makercart contains electronics, paper crafts, 3d printer, micro-computers and robotics and we work with organisations to customise each Makercart to suit their needs.
We have already worked with some library services, including: Minet Library -Lambeth (Fun Palaces 2015) , Hillingdon-Fun Palaces 2016, Croydon new children’s library opening 2017, North Kensington Library (Volunteer Saturday Maker Program 2016), Redbridge (Tech events and Lab Central), and of course Guildford Library, who have their own cart and where we’ve been involved helping set up a pop up Maker Education program and assisting setting up a permanent Makerspace and tech hub.
We have also participated in some important library events over the last couple of years: CILIP Conference 2016, ASCEL conference 2016, SCL Cracking the Code Workshops 2016 (London and Manchester), Surrey library staff conference 2016, library taskforce Makerspace day 2017, and deliver some workshops at public Libraries as part of the European Horizon 2010 DiDIY research project.
Apart from our work at Guildford Library, we are currently working with Oxfordshire, Redbridge and Kent Library services, helping them to set up Makerspaces. This work includes not only advising what equipment to get and customising Makercarts but also training staff and volunteers, creating education programs and delivering library events. We also recently delivered a training event at the amazing Deptford Lounge Library on using Maker Tech to turn Library Collections interactive and are interested in working with libraries to train staff and help create engaging creative learning spaces.
We’re continuing to develop our makerspace projects and services and have some exciting, upcoming projects that we’ll be announcing soon!