The time has come and SparkFun's Department of Education is back on the road. Linz Craig and Jim Lindblom will be on the east coast through October 16th, and they'll be doing workshops at Artist's Asylum, MIT and Tufts. Linz will also be at the upcoming Maker Faire in Somerville, MA! There's a lot to choose from and we're thrilled to see more and more Maker activity out east.
I'll be leaving Colorado in an RV on Friday, headed west. Monday will find us in Los Angeles working with Patricia at Handmade Penguin. Monday's sessions are built around the LilyPad Arduino Development board, and we'll be covering installing and programming. On Tuesday, October 16, we'll be teaming with Patricia for an all day Intro to Arduino class with the SparkFun Inventor's Kit. This class is targeted at educators looking to introduce Arduino into their respective environments. All the workshops are at the Long Beach Sea Scout Base, located at 5875 Appian Way, Long Beach, CA.
From Long Beach we'll be moving up to Paul Revere Middle School for two nights of fun with the Exploratory. Our first night (Wednesday, October 17th) is dedicated to Squishy Circuits and LilyPad, as well as craft techniques with origami and embedding electronics into items like greeting cards and holiday ornaments. The following evening will be dedicated to the Scratch programming environment and using it with the PicoBoard to create interactive animation and gaming. I'm really excited about this one -- Linz has been working on some great material and we're itching to get it into the hands of some of our younger Makers. If you're interested, there are still a couple spots open on these nights and you can sign up here.
Most of the next few days are booked in central California, but on Monday, October 22, we'll be at Noisebridge Hackerspace in San Francisco with Mitch and the gang. This is a surface-mount soldering workshop, and we'll be building the Simon kit. For spots in this class, contact the Hackerspace.
We also still have some room in our workshop at Parallax on October 24. We'll be working with the LilyPad development board, and you gan grab a spot on the events section at learn.sparkfun.com. Parallax is awesome, and we're looking forward to partnering with Ken, Jessica and all the great people at the Rocklin, CA facility. From Rocklin we head to Portland, and we've got an Intro to Arduino class with a local school on Saturday, October 27. This workshop is open to the public and we'll be glad to get you details; just email us at education@sparkfun.com.
We'll be sending briefings through our social media channels, and of course we'll follow up with a full post on the goings-on. Hope to see you on the road!
I thought you were going to be visiting JPL? Date and time? I want to say hi!
Amazing creative work for kid. shirts with horses
Ah, bummer you guys aren't coming south enough and I can't make the tip up to L.A. Oh well, maybe next tour you guys can come down to San Diego. I've been trying to influence more friends and colleagues to get involved in hacker spaces and collective hacking, but it's hard to impress on people the fun you can have with electronics unless you can show them first hand.
Let's skate and party if you drive through Vegas! Drink some Olde Fortran 800 or something.
You guys should take Stillman along, and when he's in the men's room at a truck stop, drive off really fast.
But con him into strapping one of those package trackers on himself.
Wut? You go as far as Portlandia, and don't stop in Seattle?? Seattle has got geeks too! Even when I told my wife about sewable electronics she was interested even though the only only thing she knows about arduino is that it keeps me in office for hours on end experimenting.
What's going to happen at MIT and when?
There really needs to be video in the RV. Seriously. You guys can't let this go by without some good footage.
Hi guys, These are prototype tours. Eventually we're going to try to send instructors and classes to anywhere there is a big enough population that is interested. Stay tuned for more info as 2012 winds down.
Honk as you go through Pismo..
How about coming to Indianapolis????
Good luck!
Come to the University of Oklahoma!
Tanner, we'll be headed through on Nov. 8th or 9th. Any chance of getting a tour?