This Fall, I have been hosting a Maker Monday program on the second Monday of the month at the Manchester City Library. We have played with metal model kits, Legos, as well as Ozobots and Gears! Gears! Gears! from the Maker Play Lending Library.

During the first weekend of this month, Barnes & Noble held a mini maker faire at each of their locations, which I was invited to participate in. Since then I have partnered with the Community Business Development Manager, Nathan Robbins, of the Manchester location to run Maker Mondays together.

Last week, Nathan brought 5 Ozobots from the store to the library to use with the Gears! and 2 other Ozobots I still had from the state. It was a drop-in program that only saw 1 family of 3 attend. Even so, the kids had a great time learning how to use each of the maker toys.

Determining the correct width of drawn lines and sequence of colors for tricks proved to be a fun challenge, and a little girl had a blast building up a sequence of windmill-like structures with the Gears!. The wonder of controlling the little robots with colors and the flexibility of designs with the Gears! kept the kids captivated for the quick hour of the program. Ozobots are a wonderful introduction to accessible robotics because coding is as easy as drawing a line and can include limitless variation on patterns to follow and combinations of tricks. The Gears! are a bit more challenging since it takes planning to figure out a complex, interconnected machine out of the Gears!. But I had fun just sticking pieces together and seeing how I could make them work together, as did my attendees.

Next month I will be looking forward to using the Cubelets kit from the Maker Play Lending Library in conjunction with some LittleBits from Barnes & Noble to explore circuit building and simple machines. Starting in January, I will be going to Nathan’s store to a hold second monthly Maker Monday there to teach children creative coding and building skills.

Using these maker toys to teach basic coding and hands-on skills gets children thinking in different ways and allows them to have tons of fun at the same time. In this case, it has also opened doors of opportunity I had not encountered before. If anyone thinks they might have an outreach opportunity available to them with a local business or organization, especially regarding maker activities, I would suggest taking advantage of them because people will be looking for more of these programs out of their library.

Thank you to David at the Manchester City Library for this post!