Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “National Maker Faire: Building a Nation of Makers”.
I’M Dale Dougherty in here at national Maker Faire at UDC, and I’m have here: Kumar Garg, who works for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Kumar’s again won a couple people that have worked behind the scenes. I think to make a number of important things happen. Last year was the White House Maker Faire and it was a wonderful celebration of making at the White House and bringing makers there and this year we’re here at University of district Columbia. And we have all this going on lots of people walking through and, to be honest, it looks more like a maker faire, it’s open to the public, and – and you know why did we make that change this year? Well, I think you know. Last year the president held the first-ever White House Maker Faire and really the idea behind it and the president at this amazing interaction with an 18-foot electronic giraffe named Russell that came from the Bay Area, and he also got to meet these wonderful young girls.
Who said to him, you know why start a paper route where you can start a robotics company? It was an amazing event, but was really a powerful about the event. Is the president talked about how we need to really build a nation of makers that we all have a responsibility to give more kids, more adult small entrepreneurs, access the tools, the experiences and the mentors to allow them to make things that they want? And the reason why that’s important is because working with your hands designing these different things can have a big impact in where American innovation lives into our future you’re gon na in the past sort a decade the president, when he was walking around, had this amazing interaction With the folks at the MIT mobile lab and what they talked about was that we’re seeing this huge revolution in the cost and affordability of devices like 3d printers and CMC machines, and if we were here 20 years earlier, we had that same reduction, cost of computing. These new tools are allowing kids, adults and entrepreneurs to make just about anything, but we it’s on us to make sure that all kids have access to these tools. It’S on us to make sure that this starts to integrate with the way kids learn every day in school out of school, and celebrations like this are so powerful, because what you’re seeing our libraries you’re seeing museum you’re, seeing cultural centers everybody getting involved, and that’s what? Last year was up, and what we wanted to do this year was really build on that call to action.
So just on Friday, with an event at the White House, where we had amazing makers from all of the country they’re presenting on their projects – and that was a start to a real week of making. So the president issued a proclamation really saying that we want to see events like this all over the country, and so what the DC National Maker Faire is all about is we’ve got thousands of people from around the DC area. We’Ve got hundreds of makers who flown in, and people walking around and they’re learning from each other and they’re just getting excited, and this is the beginning of a week that will have hundreds of events happen around the week. You know I really recommend people walk around and check this stuff out.
We’Ve got federal agencies from USAID from Department of Education, Veterans, Affairs and they’ve got makers who work inside those agencies, they’re building really cool things, but they really want to work with the maker community because they think this community has something they can offer. So USAID thinks that there’s makers who can develop really low cost instruments that can help farmers in the third world. You’Ve got folks that think that we can develop low-cost prosthetics. That can help veterans, and so I you know where we think we’re still in the early days of this, but we’re really excited and want to sort of keep helping grow this movement because it can help more kids, get excited about school and about learning.
It can help more entrepreneurs get started and it can help more Americans just sort of feel connected to the innovation economy, so so even walk around and just yeah. Well, even beyond education, though, I think there are some policy implications in other areas like innovation, economy, Workforce Development, yeah, and so I think, for workers. So there’s this amazing program in Pittsburgh call made right here and it works with folks who are working in the union movement that start to work with the startup community and they get access to a whole bunch of the these skills. And these you know, union workers are real learning and learning a lot of these maker skills, so I think, there’s a really strong workforce development story here.
I think that you know this is something that I can really start to become a set of tools and technologies that a lot of students interact with we had. What we announced on Friday is that 70 colleges and universities are going to do more to build maker spaces on their campuses, so students are doing this stuff. You’Ve got things like Georgia, Tech that they have an invention studio, so you’ve got students from the engineering lab from the art lab all working together, I’m making really cool projects. You know.
One thing that I found really cool on campus when I was in college, was the fact that what what sucked me in the computer science was that you started, you know designing your program in the first day of school, and then you got to see immediately whether It worked or not that sort of try, iterate, fail, build, ends up being really engaging, and so I actually think that these experiences around design courses can be really powerful. We have over a whole bunch of superintendents. We had over a hundred superintendents commit to bringing more of this stuff into school. So how do we have more capstone design courses in high school? So you can do this work? How do we have more makerspaces? We’Ve got a lot of teachers walking around who are doing this stuff, who really believe in this. So I actually think this can become a really core part of the learning experience and it gets kids more engaged because you know a lot of learning is about intrinsic motivation. You really want to learn, and so I think, there’s something really powerful that the maker movement can integrate with the broader education covers yeah, and I think one of the things we see about the maker movement sort of self-organized people taking initiative to do a lot of Good things it’s widely distributed, it happens all over and I think one of the roles of you know that I see that the White House and others is, is to help network some of these different efforts together.
You know to connect them so that universities are talking together about what they’re doing and not doing it in isolation yeah, and you know a lot of times that when mayor’s learn about this work, they get really excited about it. So you know we have this amazing thing a year ago, where we invited all these mayor’s to the White House Maker Faire and they were meeting their own constituents that weren’t been doing amazing things and they were like. You know. We have to build this more into our overall regional economic development strategy, so part of, i think, is this learning about, what’s actually already going on and then starting to think even bigger. So you know we have a bunch of places.
So Indianapolis, for example, is creating this huge industrial incubator and makerspace. That’S not thousand square feet. That’S going to help entrepreneurs.
Others makers have acts of that space. So I think mayors and and regional leaders can play a huge role. A lot of them are already playing this role. We have a number of organizations that are launching playbooks to make it easier for one mayor to learn about what’s going on another computer t so that we don’t have to learn all this stuff over again and part of the world we can sometimes play is bringing A lot of these communities together and so about a month ago, we actually brought together 20 communities around the country to do a half day at the White House where they were showing each other. These were just big cities. No, we had, you know smaller cities in state of Washington.
We had big cities, all sort of saying, here’s, what we’re doing from I’m made in campaign to a makerspace two things where the museums and libraries are in lead and what was really powerful was everybody walked away with something they weren’t doing in their community that they Were like you know, furiously scribbling down notes and they wanted to bring back. So that’s another role that we can just play, which is hey. Have you heard about this? And you know events like this can also be a place where people can learn from each other. Good well, thank you Kumar for explaining this and you Dale for everything.
You know what the maker community always needs. Are the Johnny Appleseed’s that that sort of go around and tell more people to do this work, and I you know we’re thankful that it’s happening here and it gave me an important part of the American story. Great. Thank you.
No thank you. .