My Experience at Maker Faire 2015 (and Questions Raised about the Future of Making)

by Mikala Streeter

Waiting at the Caltrain early on a Sunday morning, it was clear that today was a special day. Families lined the platform in Mountain View, eager to get to this year’s Maker Faire in San Mateo.

As we got on the train, a little boy asked his dad, “What’s our stop? When do we get off?”

To which the dad replied, “We’re getting off in Hillsdale. It’s just a few stops away.”

The boy turned back around in his seat, barely able to contain himself as the train took off, headed towards a very exciting day for all of us.

As we got closer to the Faire, more and more families packed onto the train. Within two more stops, there was standing room only and the conductor had to make an announcement, “We can’t leave until everyone is on the train. Squeeze in tight or it will take us longer to get to Maker Faire”. Clearly the conductor knew what was up this weekend!

This was my third (or maybe my fourth, I’ve lost count) Maker Faire. I started going because I was a teacher and if I brought my students to the Education Day (on Thursday before the Faire opened to the public), I’d get two free tickets to come back with a friend on the weekend. Before beginning graduate school at Stanford this year, I taught high school computer science in East Palo Alto for the last few years, so I was excited for the opportunity to take my students to an early showing of the Maker Faire exhibits (and also to get free tickets, of course!). None of us had ever heard of Maker Faire before, so we weren’t sure of what to expect, but an afternoon of science and engineering seemed right up our alley.

The kids mostly enjoyed it, though it was aimed more at elementary school students than high school students. They got to talk to some of the makers and get ideas about projects they wanted to work on back at school and in their free time. Of course, they asked me, why don’t we make fire breathing dragons at school? Good question, would you like to make a fire breathing dragon? Actually nah, but I would like to make this… and they’d go off to another booth and explore something else that seemed cool.

Each year, I’d come back on the weekend, maybe with a friend, maybe not. It all depended on whether I wanted to roam freely or wanted a companion to share interesting ideas with. It’s like shopping by yourself or with a friend. Do you want to stand in the jeans section while she looks for a pair, if you really want to look at sweaters in a different store? Depends on the day, right? ☺

This year, I chose to go by myself and roam freely around the Faire. Now that I’m in graduate school, I think a lot about the experience of tech-focused spaces.

Is it welcoming? Who is in attendance? What is valued? How do we know? So, I took that lens to the Faire, frankly because, I mostly can’t turn it off and because I was curious to see how the Faire faired.

When my train arrived at Hillsdale this weekend, I followed a mass of people in one direction. I trusted that they were going towards the Faire, so as we walked along I looked among the crowd to see who was there. Were there mainly families, were there couples or groups of friends? Were there older people, younger people or mostly little kids? In the group of people walking with me, I mostly saw dads with their sons. There were a few families that also included a mom and a daughter or two. I wondered if their visit to the Faire had started off as a “father/son thing” that had been expanded upon request of mother or daughter, or if it had started off as a “family thing”. I also saw a group that seemed to be a mom, her daughter and her daughter’s friends. They raced by me on their scooters, excited to get to the Faire! I was hoping to see other young adults like me, but I didn’t see too many. I also didn’t see any other people of color, but I was suppose that was to be expected…

Once inside, I wasn’t sure where to go, so I started with food. Even though I’d left pretty early in the morning, by the time I got to the Faire, it was already 11am and breakfast had worn off. I’ve been trying a low carb diet but that wasn’t happening today given my limited choices, so a teriyaki chicken wrap would have to do.

Food in hand, I stumbled onto a painted container called something like, a Make Shelter. I thought the use of the word “shelter” was odd, so I read the sign to see what it was about. Apparently, it was a mobile container that they took from city to city, engaging homeless people in making and fabrication. The container was full of 3D printers, computers and other machines, as well as tables to work on and chairs to sit in. What a clever idea! The person running the container was busy talking with others so I continued on.

A part of Maker Faire is that anyone who makes something can present, so people who make Maker Spaces, robots, art, clothes, food, gardens, anything really, are all welcome.

So I walked through the clothes, books and art section to see what was there. It felt a bit off to the side this year, away from the rest of the projects, almost as though it wasn’t as interesting or significant. It also seemed to me like the clothes were all of the same style. In years past, there have been “hippie” (not hipster) clothes, high fashion clothes and even bags and jewelry, and more hip hop style clothes as well. This year, they mostly just had hippie clothes, which aren’t my thing… I wonder where the other designers were this year. I also wondered why there weren’t clothing-related electronics projects mixed among these designers and artists. Where were the booths to add LEDs to a painting? Or the space to wire up a buttons on a jacket to a LilyPad Arduino?

As I walked by this year’s fire breathing dragons and roaming R2D2s, I thought, Is this all getting to be a bit cliche?

Is this the ultimate instantiation of the making culture? Recreating the same kinds of projects each year — the same robots, the same homemade ferris wheels, the same hippie clothing. What is my reason to come back each year if it all feels the same?

But I was hopeful so I went into a huge tent nearby. Partly to find the bathroom but also to see what other projects were there. At the entry to this tent, I was greeted by several student projects. One from a high school robotics team being presented by a teenage girl and another from a young boy who had started a 3D printing name tag business. His sign read something like, I’m 10 years old and I’ve already started my own company. Come get your name tag printed using code that I’ve written. He and his mom were proudly sitting at their table eagerly waiting to talk to attendees. The teenage girl was standing nervously by herself in front of her team’s poster.

To me, this scene was so representative of everything people write about “the future of computing and making”. A girl on a robotics team and a kid starting a tech company. But it felt so wrong. Not because they shouldn’t do those things, but because the vibe of each booth was so different. The girl was alone representing her team. Where were her teammates? Why was her booth in the corner? Did she have a chair? Why was she so nervous? And on the other hand, this young boy and his family seem to have come to believe that being a child prodigy in the tech industry is the height of all accomplishments. Has he fulfilled the “dream” of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg? Will his name tag business gain his family riches so he doesn’t have to go to college if he doesn’t want to? Will his early coding skills put him ahead of the pack at Stanford (or whatever university)?

He wasn’t the only young startup mogul I saw at the Faire. There was another young boy, who was “only” 8 years old and had started his own company too. His mom also sat with him helping to explain his brilliant idea. Though I can’t remember what it was…

Is this the goal? Either you make it rich by 18 or you’re not sufficiently amazing? That sounds pretty unwelcoming to me.

How can we expect students to try making or computing if the goal is to have natural talent and incredible ambition, to peak before you finish puberty.

There was also another group of girls (and guys) representing their robotics team, from Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy in SoCal. They were decked out in black jumpsuits covered in company logos. It felt like I was in the pit at Nascar. In pairs, students proudly shared about some part of the team’s work and what life was like at their school. While I was talking with students, there were at least 15–20 other people there crowding around, listening to students and asking questions. What an incredible opportunity for the students, to see their hard work valued by all of the people who stopped by to talk with them over the course of the weekend. How empowering that must have been for them.

But then I also wondered about the idea of an engineering academy. To get into such a school, you have to already know what engineering is. You have to know that something about it appeals to you, either because you’ve tried it before or because you know it has something to do with computers or video games and you like those. Or, you have to know someone who knows what engineering is and thinks you might like it if you tried it. But what about all of the kids who might like it if they tried it, but won’t get to because the experience is now walled up in this academy? What is the value of having such a selective experience at the high school level, as opposed to having it embedded in a more comprehensive school?

Now certainly there are other types of similarly focused high schools in other disciplines — like the arts, business, and the military, but the same questions would apply. Students develop interests because they are exposed to them and if we wall them off, where will students get these experiences? Will an engineering academy be limited to the privileged students who have been already exposed to engineering or who know someone who can convince them that it’s worth pursuing? That would all have to happen before high school, before 8th grade really, so that they could apply in time.

When I was teaching computer science, our program was embedded in the daily life of the school. The classes were open to anyone and other students could regularly see and hear what kinds of projects we were working on. Most of my students had very little science and engineering experience before coming to our school, so our classes were the main source of exposure. At first, when I would try to recruit a new student to join a CS class, they would push back and say that it wasn’t for them, that they didn’t like sitting in front of the computer or that they were more of a writer/dancer/artist and less of a “computer nerd”.

But when I would tell them about the student who built an app to remove graffiti from her neighborhood, the kid who made a video game using characters he had drawn himself, the pair of girls who made a chair designed just for comfort while reading, or the team who built a device to clean trash from the ocean, they would begin to see where CS and engineering could fit into their lives amongst all their other interests. They see that they don’t have to give up being a writer, dancer, artist, athlete, or however else they define themselves because computing is a tool that you can use to bring your ideas to life. And where do your ideas come from but those other parts of who you are, from those experiences that you love and enjoy so much?

Students need to see the technical and the non-technical side by side to see how they can fit together inside themselves. If we silo one off from the other, they’ll miss the point. They’ll see computing and making as all about building random cool stuff for it’s own sake. And while there’s certainly a place for that, for most people that’s not sufficiently compelling. Maybe building random cool stuff and the allure of riches in tech can pull you in initially, but what keeps you there is the love of solving problems and creating things that matter to you, that connect your favorite pieces of who you are.

Recently, I was talking with some of my former students about why they love engineering enough to teach it to middle school students in their hometown of East Palo Alto. At first, they said they’re in it for the money. But I pushed back and asked them, You can make lots of money in other fields, like being a doctor or a lawyer, why choose engineering as your path?

And their response was, Because we love the space for creativity, for problem-solving and for using our imagination. We love engineering because it gives us a way to change the world.