Category Archives: Maker

Best of 2018 at Tam Makers

2018 was an exceptionally fun and busy year for Tam Makers, the community makerspace which Geo Monley and I co-founded a couple years ago!

We welcomed new teachers, including our first student teacher. We created an award-winning art float for social change with over a hundred volunteers. We started a teen maker club and other activities for high school students. Our community members amazed us with cool new projects.

Here are just a few highlights of what happened this year at Tam Makers, with photos and shout-outs to community members who made them happen. If you live in the Bay Area and would like to join the fun, sign up for our new classes and workshops for adults and teens in 2019.

We’d like to thank all of our community members who made Tam Makers so special this past year! Your energy keeps our shop alive with activity and it brings us great joy to work and play with all of you. Happy New Year!

January 2018 – New Teachers and Classes

Several of our community makers took on new roles as regular instructors at Tam Makers. Furniture maker Pierina Dell’Avo led our You Can Build It workshops. Creative director Chris Krueger taught CNC Router classes at Tam Makers and made many improvements to our makerspace this year.

To learn more about our teachers, visit our Community page — or just sign up for their classes.

February 2018 – Community Table and Benches

A group of volunteers organized by Julia Dorn built this picnic table and benches, and set them up by Tam High School’s music building. This was just one of the community projects that took place at Tam Makers this year. See photos of our latest projects in our Tam Makers album.

March 2018 – Creating an Art Float for Social Change

In spring 2018, we created an Art Float for Social Change, to inspire people to participate in democracy. This community art project was built by a team of over a hundred volunteers, led by Fabrice Florin and Geo Monley at Tam Makers. We are grateful to them all — and to Tam High School for hosting this project and presenting it at the student center on Earth Day. To see how we created this float, view our project slides and photo album, as well as this Independent Journal article.

April 2018 – New Shop Tools

This spring, the Tam shop acquired new equipment for machining metal and plastic. Students used these Sherline milling machines and lathes to make a variety of parts, such as marble mazes and these handmade joints for our Art Float. See more photos in our Tam Makers album.


May 2018 – Art Float at Memorial Day Parade

The Art Float for Social Change made its debut at the Memorial Day Parade in Mill Valley. Our unique parade float featured Mother Earth and a circle of waving hands, spinning on a carousel of art pulled by a giant feathered serpent. Dozens of volunteers marched with us and our partners at Good Earth, MVCAN, Pataphysical Studios and the Youth Poster Contest. We received the Best Community Spirit Award for this collective art project, which invited people to vote and create a better world! To see the Art Float in action, watch this video and event photos.

June 2018 – New Student Projects

Tam High students created a variety of cool projects this year at Tam Makers, under the guidance of Geo Monley. Rebecca designed a beautiful bowl on Adobe Illustrator and cut it out on the laser cutter. Will designed and built this practical desk out of incense cedar and epoxy resin. To learn how to create projects like these, sign up for one of our classes for adults and teens.

July 2018 – Art Float on Fourth of July

People loved our Art Float at the Fourth of July Parade! We strolled down the streets of Larkspur and Corte Madera, showing off our giant earth and dragon of change to inspire thousands of spectators. Tam High student Emma Spike and the Freedom Singers performed classic protest songs on our float podium. Folks sang along, cheered us and responded to our call to “vote, speak up — and be the change!” See more parade pictures in this Art Float media page and in this photo album.


August 2018 – Planning Our Next Steps

To plan our next steps for Tam Makers, our core team held a retrospective this summer, with Chris Krueger, Fabrice Florin, Geo Monley and Meryl Rubinstein (shown from left to right on the photo above). They are holding the First Prize trophy we won for our Art Float at this year’s Fourth of July Parade in Corte Madera.


September 2018 – Our First Student Teacher

Tam High student Niles Wertz became our first teenage instructor this fall, with his ‘Introduction to Wood Turning’ class. An experienced wood turner, he showed adults how to make objects such as wooden pens, mallets, candlesticks, spinning tops, and bowls. He sells his own creations at local arts and craft shows, such as the Mill Valley Fall Arts show, where the photo above was taken.

October 2018 – Teen Maker Club

This fall, we started the Teen Maker Club, a new weekly afternoon workshop for students ages 12 – 17. As a result, many young makers have started to use the shop to create their own projects after school. They get to learn laser cutting, 3D printing, electronics, robotics, woodworking and more in activities supervised by Tam Makers director Geo Monley.

November 2018 – Automata Workshop

Last November, we led a fun workshop on how to create automata — or kinetic sculptures. Geo Monley hosted a group of North Bay Maker Educators, who learned how to make their automata move round-and-round, side-to-side or up-and-down. They designed their own animatronics, such as this animated cat, using bamboo sticks attached to foam cams, sliding through 3D-printed guides in their wooden boxes. We hope Marin students will enjoy creating their own automata as much as their teachers did! See also our short video, photos and lesson plan.


December 2018 – Meet our Community

Meet some of the folks who make our Tam Makers community so special! The week before Christmas, a few of the regulars joined open shop sessions to build projects that made us happy. For us, the best holiday gift of all was the act of creation, in the company of like minds.

We’re a community of makers and artists who like to build things together and learn from each other. To meet some of our makers, visit our community page. To learn about our activities, visit our classes page. And to stay in touch, sign up for our newsletter.

Happy New Year from all of us at Tam Makers!

This page was created by Fabrice Florin and originally published here on the Tam Makers site.

Bamboodu Float at the Parade

People loved our Bamboodu Float at the 2017 Mill Valley Memorial Day Parade!

I created this political art performance with the Mill Valley Community Action Network (MVCAN), to express our frustration with the Trump regime.

Our puppet theater on wheels stars Lady Liberty and Tiny Trump: each time Trump tweets fake news, Liberty bonks him on his thick bobble head.

Here’s a video of our parade with dozens of artists and MVCAN members:

Thousands of spectators cheered and sang along with us: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses …” This lovely poem by Emma Lazarus was turned into song by Gareth Loy and performed by local singers, including members of the Shady Ladies.

Veteran journalist Paul Liberatore wrote this fine cover story for the Independent Journal, the largest newspaper in the North Bay. ABC 7 News featured our political art throughout their Memorial Day coverage (a clip from their news report is included in the above video). Our video also includes footage from a wonderful parade montage by Gary Yost, with a moving guitar solo by young musician Matt Jaffe.

This Memorial Day Parade was organized by Larry “the Hat” Lautzker, Mill Valley’s colorful clothier. The parade judges gave us the “Best Community Spirit Award.” One judge, Eric Christensen, explained why he voted for our entry: “I thought it was a very appropriate message to send on Memorial Day: if people don’t stand up to Trump and his policies, our future will be filled with many more war dead to memorialize.” 

Our friends at MVCAN invited me to give a talk about this project and the importance of art in politics at their monthly MVCAN meeting. Here are my takeaways:

  • Art engages us at a deeper level
  • It unites us around shared emotions
  • We identify with the characters of our stories
  • We spread our message to a wider audience
  • It invites people of all ages to participate
  • It sparks our imagination to invent the future
  • Making art together is fun and inspiring
  • It encourages playful collaborations
  • It builds community and strengthens our bonds

Here’s the video of my talk. See our slides for more info.

I’m very grateful to all the MVCAN friends and neighbors who helped build this float in our front yard: Danny Altman, Laura Boles, Phyllis Florin, David Glad, Peter Graumann, Edward Janne, Suz Lipman, Charlene Lundgren, Jean Marie Murphy, Mark Petrakis and Martha Roush, to name but a few. See the team in action in our photo album.

Special thanks to my amazing friend and associate Edward Janne, who designed and engineered the technology behind this float, using an Arduino, an MP3 shield and NeoPixel matrices. He coded the Bamboodu Player, the custom software which allowed me to choreograph our live performance, using this simple script. If you’d like to learn how to build systems like these, we’ll teach another Arduino class together this fall at Tam Makers.

Many thanks as well to our friends at Pataphysical Studios, our art collective, who marched ahead of us holding a large Traffic Jam sign, from an earlier caper memorialized in this video. We all wore our purple lab coats and funny hats, to set the tone for this new political art march.

I’m really happy that so many people enjoyed our Bamboodu Theater — and that our performance helped promote the Mill Valley Community Action Network — a grassroots political group that helps us coordinate our resistance to right-wing attacks on our liberties. 

Through this interactive art experience, we hope to engage people of all ages to get engaged in political action. If you live in the North Bay, sign up here on the MVCAN site — and join your neighbors to keep democracy alive!

Vive la liberté!

Fabrice

Learn more about the Bamboodu Float:

#art #bamboodu #indivisible #mvcan #politics #puppets #resist #theater

Bamboodu Theater

Behold the Bamboodu Theater, my new puppet stage for civic events and art shows.

This interactive theater experience features the Bamboodu spirit, a mythical creature rising from the earth to expose the troubles facing America and the world. Above his head are some of the characters that haunt his dreams, playing out the eternal fight between fear and hope.

Our first scene stars Lady Liberty and Mr. Trump. As surreal music plays, Mr. Trump’s recent tweets and alternative facts scroll by on a news ticker below the stage. Each time Trump says something wrong, Liberty hits him on his thick, bobbing head — until his oversize jacket falls off, revealing that the emperor truly has no clothes.

At the end of this short play, we invite our guests to sing along the inspiring words of Emma Lazarus’s poem about the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor …”). Through this interactive experience, we hope to engage people of all ages to think about the values we share — and help change the world through civic action.

Bamboodu Theater is a work-in-progress, combining mixed-media art with radical puppetry, along with electronic text, lights and sounds powered by Arduino. We customize the experience for each public appearance, whether it is shown as a stand-alone exhibit, a parade float or a street theater performance.

We premiered this interactive theater experience at Signs of Hope, an inspiring exhibit of political art that ran from April 14th to 29th at Art Works Downtown in San Rafael. See photos of our theater in that exhibit. Learn more on our project page.

We are now building a special float to feature the Bamboodu Theater at the Mill Valley Memorial Day Parade on Monday, May 29, 2017. To create this float, I am working with a wonderful team at the Mill Valley Community Action Network (MVCAN), a local political group which I recently joined to resist the conservative takeover of our country.

Our new Bamboodu Float is coming along very nicely, as shown in this photo album. Learn more on our project page. In coming months, we plan to show it at other civic events and political rallies.

Bamboodu Theater was created by Fabrice Florin, in collaboration with Phyllis Florin, Edward Janne, Mark Petrakis, Geo Monley, Jean Bolte, Howard Rheingold and our friends at Pataphysical Studios and Tam Makers. Special thanks to Gareth Loy for permission to use his Mother of Exiles song, and to all the MVCAN members who are helping build our parade float: Danny Altman, Laura Boles, David Glad, Peter Graumann, Suz Lipman and Jean Marie Murphy, to name but a few. I’m deeply grateful to you all.

It’s been a true pleasure to work with so many friends and neighbors to keep democracy alive through art and theater.
Vive la liberté!

Teaching Maker Art

Students show off their Halloween Wonderbox at our first 'maker art' workshop at the Mill Valley Library.

Students show off their Halloween Wonderbox at our first ‘maker art’ workshop at the Mill Valley Library.

For the past couple years, I have been teaching ‘maker art’ to lower and middle school children, to help them create interactive art with electronics and storytelling.

In our after-school classes, we build magical worlds together: a city of the future, a haunted house, a time machine or a halloween wonderbox. We show students how to bring them to life with animated characters, light them up, make them move, play sounds and tell their stories.

This hands-on, project-based activity invites children to learn by doing, in a playful way that engages all their senses and puts them in charge of their own learning.

Here’s an overview of our first  classes for elementary and middle school students ages 6 to 14, in four different Bay Area schools and libraries (see list below).

Watch the video below for an overview on Maker Art. See also our separate report on the Time Machine, which we created with our 4th and 5th graders at the Lycée Français in 2017. Later this year, I will post more reports on our other projects (Haunted House, City of the Future).

Watch this video of Fabrice’s talk about our Maker Art classes at the 2017 Maker Faire.

 

What is Maker Art?

In our Maker Art classes, we invite children to create magical worlds together, combining art, technology and storytelling. Our students get really engaged in the process, which helps them develop their creative, problem-solving and social skills.

Here’s what we have learned so far from these Maker Art classes:

  • Maker art is deeply engaging
  • Art + tech + stories appeal to more learners
  • They identify with their characters
  • Creative freedom gives them license to play
  • Student-driven projects build their confidence
  • Collaborations are fun and productive
  • Family activities level the age gap
  • Wonderboxes help frame our imagination

This is what school should be like: project-based, hands-on, student-driven and collaborative.

To learn more, watch the above video of my talk on Maker Art at the 2017 Maker Faire. This 20 min. presentation gives a good overview of this promising new way to encourage children to develop their creative, problem-solving and collaborative skills (see slides).

I will give another talk about our Maker Art classes at the ReMake Education Summit in August 2017. In the meantime, check the above videos and slides, as well as these photos of our classes. I plan to write a more in-depth blog post about these findings in coming weeks. For now, here are more lessons learned, written by our team during our first experiments.

Update: In winter 2017, our Maker Art class built a Time Machine, a new time travel experience created by 4th and 5th graders at the Lycée Français. As shown in this video, our interactive art exhibit invites you to travel through time and meet characters from the past, present and future: participants created nine diorama scenes, from the age of dinosaurs to the 50th century. Read our full report on this class.

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, we invite you to come visit us at Tam Makers, our new makerspace in Mill Valley. We offer a range of maker classes for adults and teens. Join one of our free meetups on the First Thursday of every month, starting in September. Making art together is fun and educational!

 

Young art maker Josephine Maeght shows off the Chinese New Year Wonderbox she is creating with another student at the Lycée Français.

Young art maker Josephine Maeght shows off the Chinese New Year Wonderbox she created with another student at the Lycée Français in Sausalito.

Create Your Own Wonderbox

In our workshops, we give each student a small cardboard ‘wonderbox’ and ask them to create an interesting scene in that box, on a given theme (e.g. Chinese New Year, see below). They learn to design and build their artworks, then bring them to life with lights, motion and sound. At the end of the course, we assemble all their boxes together and ask students to tell their stories for a short video ‘show and tell’. We provide all the materials for this course and students can take their wonderbox home at the end.

This educational program invites children to develop a wide range of new skills, across multiple disciplines: from creative expression to science and engineering. They seem really engaged by the freedom to create their own interactive art, which gives them more control over their learning experience. And working collaboratively, they get to experiment together and help each other create something greater than any of them could do on their own.

Learn more about our Wonderbox workshops here. For more info, read about our first Wonderbox workshop at the Mill Valley Library, then view this video and photo album, as well as the workshop instructions. This program was developed by artists and educators at Pataphysical Studios, creators of the ‘Pataphysical Slot Machine.

 

Maker art students are creating Chinese New Year Wonderboxes with different animals from the Chinese Zodiac at the Lycée Français in Sausalito.

Maker art students created Chinese New Year Wonderboxes with different animals from the Chinese Zodiac at the Lycée Français in Sausalito.

Chinese New Year Wonderbox

Celebrate the Chinese New Year by making an art wonderbox with a paper lantern and animated character.

In this course, students get to pick an animal from the Chinese Zodiac (e.g.: dragon, horse, tiger, snake). We give them a laser-cut wood figure as a framework to build on, as well as lots of art & crafts supplies and electronic parts. Kids bring them to life by making their characters move, light up, play sound — then coloring and decorating them with markers, fabric, feathers and jewels (see photo).

Children learn to:
• Light up a paper lantern
• Make a button and circuit
• Make their animal move
• Decorate their box
• Play sounds
• Tell their story

To learn more, watch this prototype video of the Chinese New Year Wonderbox — as well as this video of our first experiments with making animals move. You’ll also find more details in our course overview.

Our lower school students seem to love this fun and educational activity. They enjoy lighting up their lanterns and making their art move — and they gain a deeper understanding of electrical and mechanical engineering, as well as creative design and innovation.

Young art maker Theodore Carman built a cardboard propeller to move his flying dragon for the Chinese New Year Wonderbox he is making at the Lycée Français.

Young art maker Theodore Carman built a cardboard propeller to move his flying dragon for the Chinese New Year Wonderbox he is making at the Lycée Français.

For example, to make their animals move, they had to explore different ways to animate their creatures: using glue sticks to make them vibrate, or hand-made paper propellers to push them forward and make other objects move (see photo). In the process, we’re all learning to create simple ‘poetic robots’ — with just a few affordable parts that anyone can assemble together.

The Chinese New Year is our theme for January and February 2016. Our next theme from March to July 2016 will be to build a City of the Future, as outlined below.

 

What will life be like in the 22nd century? Help dream up a better world and build a City of the Future. Art by Boombastik3 via Deviant Art.

What will life be like in the 22nd century? Help dream up a better world and build a City of the Future.
Future City Art by Boombastik3 via Deviant Art, freely licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA.

City of the Future

Create a city of the future with arts and electronics!

In this course, children will imagine what the world will be like in 100 years, then build a futuristic model together.

This spring, I am teaming up with teacher and builder Geo Monley to teach this cool after-school maker course for middle-school students, held in his fabulous wood shop at Tam High. We will invite kids to invent the future by building it with art and electronics, making models of what life might be like in the next century. Starting March 30, we will meet every Wednesday from 3:30pm to 5:30pm at Tam High School in Mill Valley.

Students will first make a futuristic home with a cardboard ‘wonderbox’ and a small character, featuring a new invention that might change our lives in the 22nd century. They will then bring them to life by making their characters move, lights blink and sounds play. Next, they will work with other students to assemble their boxes into a small city of the future. At the end of the course, we will make a short video of their creations — which they get to keep.

Here is a first example of what our city of the future could look like.

The City of the Future will include a row of 'wonderbox' homes in the foreground, and a city landscape in the background. It will be about 6 feet wide, 3 feet deep and up to 4 feet high, and be placed on a rolling 'maker art cart.'

This 3D model shows a first visualization for our city of the future, to be designed with our students.
Created by Fabrice Florin with Sketchup, CC-BY-SA.

Our city of the future will include a row of ‘wonderbox’ homes in the foreground, and a city landscape in the background. The model will be about 6 feet wide, 3 feet deep and up to 4 feet high, and be showcased on a ‘maker art cart’.

Learn more about this City of the Future course here.

 

2016 Courses

We taught 5 different ‘maker art’ courses and workshops in 2016, in Marin and the Bay Area:

(Update: courses grayed out below are either full or have already occurred)

Maker Art Class
Lycée Français in Sausalito – Jan. to June 2016
Weekly after-school class for children ages 6-10
Themes: Chinese New Year | City of the Future
Thursday afternoons for 90 minutes
For enrolled students of the Lycée only
Learn more

Wonderbox Workshop
Lycée Français in San Francisco – Feb. 15, 17 and 19
Special workshop for children ages 7-10
Theme: Chinese New Year
Three classes of 90 minutes each during ski week
For enrolled students of the Lycée only
Learn more

Create Your Own Wonderbox
Mill Valley Public Library – Feb 16 and 18
FREE workshop for children ages 8-10
Theme: Chinese New Year
Two classes of 2 hours each during ski week.
No experience required. Grades 3-5 only. Parents welcome.
Learn more

City of the Future
Tamalpais High School – March to May 2016
Weekly after-school class for children ages 10-14
Wednesdays at 3:30pm, for 2 hours
No experience required. Parents welcome.
With Geo Monley at Tam Makers
Learn more

Create a Haunted House
Lycée Français in Sausalito – Sep. to Dec. 2016
After-school class for ages 7-10 (grades 4-5)

Thursdays at 3:30pm, for 90 minutes
For enrolled students of the Lycée only
Learn more

 

Learn more about the maker art program in this project overview — and follow our progress in this photo album.

Next steps

Overall, this ‘maker art’ program seems like a great way to teach art and technology to school children, in a playful way that makes their learning experience more fun. So far, the students are responding well to this hands-on, project-based activity: they seem engaged by the freedom to create their own interactive art, which is music to my ears. And their parents also seem to really appreciate this fun and educational program.

To experiment with this vision, I am leading these pilot courses in 2016, with the help of my maker art community. We will determine next steps for this program after evaluating our first pilot results. Possible outcomes might include more Wonderbox workshops, a public maker space in Marin, a full line of Wonderbox kits, an online Wonderbox site for videos — and/or training programs for educators. We also hope that this program can help grow an ‘art maker movement’ over time.

For now, I am really enjoying this new chapter of my life as a maker art teacher. Designing and leading this program has been very fulfilling so far — even if it can be exhausting at times. In a sense, this is a culmination of all the work I’ve done in my career, from education to entertainment and technology, bringing together the physical and digital worlds to support better collaborations and deeper understandings.

Every decade or so, I try to re-invent myself and take a new challenge. My last decade was focused on facts and how to tell them apart from fiction — first with our NewsTrust experiment, then on a much wider scale with Wikipedia. It’s very likely that my next decade will be all about art, learning and community.

 

Art makers from Pataphysical Studios help prototype different ways to make animals move for the Chinese New Year Wonderbox course.

Art makers from Pataphysical Studios help prototype different ways to make animals move for the Chinese New Year Wonderbox course.

Thank you

I would like to thank my art and learning communities and the great team of friends who are working with me to offer these classes.

First off, I’m very grateful to the schools and libraries who are hosting this program: Andrew Sobol, Marjolaine Debord and Wladymir Wladymir Paiva and everyone at the Lycée Français; Anji Brenner and Karen Clarke at the Mill Valley Library — and Chris McCune and Betty Sue Johnson at the Tam High Union District. This classes would not be possible without their wonderful support of our cause.

I’m particularly grateful to my partners in the classroom: Cynthia Gilbert at the Lycée Français; and Geo Monley at Tam High School. Heartfelt thanks as well to my wife Phyllis for preparing the art supplies for this class, and to my art friends from Pataphysical Studios: Howard Rheingold, Jean Bolte and her daughter Natalina for their advice, creative prototypes, art supplies and help assembling the kits. Kudos as well to Tara Brown at Kithub for supplying the electronic parts.

Last but not least, it’s a real pleasure to meet parents of our students, and getting them engaged in the process. And it’s a real pleasure to be teaching their children, whose curiosity, creativity and enthusiasm are an inspiration to me.

I’m so happy to see a little community grow around our first maker art courses: I hope that over time we can turn this initiative into a vibrant community learning network.

Onwards!

Fabrice

Introducing Tam Makers

Tam Makers is a community of makers, teachers and students in Marin County. We build things together and offer courses, meetups and a makerspace at Tam High School in Mill Valley. To learn more, visit http://tammakers.org

We are starting Tam Makers, a new makerspace in Marin — and invite you to come visit, if you are in the area.

We offer courses for adults and teens, meetups and a new makerspace at Tamalpais High School, in our state-of-the-art wood shop and computer lab.

We created this community center to serve the needs of our local community, whether you are interested in making things for yourself or supporting a makerspace for your children.

Join our meetups

If you live in our area, come to one of our free meetups, so we can tell you more, hear what you think and plan our next steps together. Our monthly meetups are listed here and run from 6 to 8pm in our makerspace at Tam High School (see address below). Adults and teens welcome. If you missed our last meetup, here are photos and slides of this event, as well as the video of our presentation and group discussion.

Sign up for classes

This year, we are offering a wide range of classes for adults and youth: from Arduino to laser cutting, hand tools, wood turning and how to make elegant boxes, to name but a few.

Learn more in our Classes page, where you can sign up for these classes before they fill up.

All adult classes start at 6pm. Teens can also sign up for these classes, with the help of an adult.

Visit our makerspace

All events are at Tamalpais High School, in our state-of-the-art wood shop and computer lab: 700 Miller Avenue (Room 416), Mill Valley, CA 94941. See map.

The best times to visit our makerspace are during our free meetups (see above). To get a feel for our space and community, check out the Tam Makers Photo Album.

Meet our team

Organizers include: Geo Monley, Fabrice Florin, Howard Rheingold and our maker friends, with the Tam High School District’s Community Ed program.

We are developing this program to build fun maker projects with our community and learn from each other.

For more information, visit tammakers.org . To get our newsletters, subscribe to our mailing list. You can also email us at info@tammakers.org .

We hope you will join us. We invite you to share this page with friends and neighbors.

See you soon!

This post was updated on August 6, 2016 to introduce new classes and meetups.

Maker Art: Build a City of the Future

What will life be like in the 22nd century? Help dream up a better world and build a City of the Future. Art by Boombastik3 via Deviant Art.

Create a city of the future in this cool after-school activity.
Future Art by Boombastik3, CC-BY-NC-SA.

Update: This spring, we created a city of the future with lower and middle school children, ages 7-14.

We invited them to imagine what the world will be like in 100 years, combining art, technology and storytelling to express themselves and develop new skills.

We taught this after-school ‘maker art’ class in two different schools:

Children were deeply engaged by this hands-on, project-based, student-driven, collaborative activity. We think this ‘maker art’ program is a great way to learn by doing, and we would like to offer it to more children and educational partners.

Here’s our original overview for this fun and educational after-school activity.

What is it?

Create a city of the future with arts and electronics!

In this maker art course, you will build a cool model of what our world could be like in 100 years. You will first make a futuristic home with a cardboard ‘wonderbox’ and an animated character. You will then bring it to life by making your character move, lights blink and sounds play.

Next, you will assemble your boxes into a small city of the future, and landscape it together. At the end of the course, we will make a short video of your creations — and you get to keep your box when the course ends.

Who is it for?

This after-school course is for middle-school students, ages 10 to 14 (6th to 9th grades). No experience necessary!

What will students learn?

Our classes combine art and technology to help you develop a range of skills: science, technology, engineering, art and math skills (STEAM); creative expression and communication skills.

You will create your own interactive art, in a playful way that makes learning more fun. You will also collaborate with other students to build something greater than you could do on your own.

When is it?

During our spring course, we meet every Wednesday from 3:30 to 5:30pm at Tam High School’s wood shop in Mill Valley. This 2-hour class runs for 8 weeks, from March 30 to May 25, 2016.

What will it look like?

Here is a first example of what our city of the future could look like.

The City of the Future will include a row of 'wonderbox' homes in the foreground, and a city landscape in the background. It will be about 6 feet wide, 3 feet deep and up to 4 feet high, and be placed on a rolling 'maker art cart.'

This 3D model shows a first visualization for our city of the future, to be designed with our students.
Created by Fabrice Florin with Sketchup, CC-BY-SA.

Our city of the future will include a row of ‘wonderbox’ homes in the foreground, and a city landscape in the background. The model will be about 6 feet wide, 3 feet deep and up to 4 feet high, and be showcased on a ‘maker art cart’. See our course slides for more images.

Who is teaching this?

Fabrice Florin is teaching this course with Geo Monley, Cynthia Gilbert and other art makers.

As a multimedia innovator, Fabrice has led the development of many pioneering products in education, news and entertainment, working with Apple, Macromedia, Wikipedia and other digital media groups. He is a lead designer at Pataphysical Studios and is teaching several maker art courses in the Bay Area.

The Tam High course for middle school children is hosted by Chris McCune and Betty Sue Johnson at Tam District Community Education. Advisors include Jean Bolte, Tara Brown, Donald Day, Dale Dougherty, Phyllis Florin, Natalina Frederick, Cynthia Gilbert, Howard Rheingold and our art maker community. We’re grateful to them all for making this course possible!

Will you teach more courses?

Yes! We will also teach a week-long ‘maker camp’ the week of July 11, every weekday from 9am to 1pm: in this camp, we will learn to program Arduino boards to build our city of the future.

Sign up here for this summer camp.
Tuition: $325 per student. Materials and Arduino board included.

How can I learn more?

You can learn more about this project in this course overview — and read about our other ‘maker art‘ courses in 2016.

For our spring courses, you can track our progress in each school here:

If you have any questions, you’re welcome to email me — and we invite you to spread the word in your community.

We look forward to coaching more children to become art makers!

Fabrice