DIY Become a Maker — for kids

If you didn’t noticed that last year “Do It Yourself” aka DIY made a comeback then read further. If your one of those DIY’ers read also further, it involves inspiring your kids.

DIY

Since last year you see a lot of DIY posts and communities. Things like the Arduino board to create home automatics and devices or the Raspberry Pi mini server. The Raspberry Pi is an attempt to get kids closer to programming, it costs around 30€ depends where you buy it. You can plug it in your TV hook up a keyboard and mouse and install the Linux distro. Besides that it has MIT’s Scratch installed an a version of Python for kids and there is a Raspberry PI manual that explains everything step by step.

But Not only in IT since a while now there are also a lot of TV shows, build your house, all those renovation shows. But since a while there are also a few shows to do all kinds of repair stuff at home, create things from scrap or recycle stuff.
Besides that I also see a change in children’s programs, I see kids idols do some DIY section in the show. Or shows where a few people do the most crazy things like trying to let a kid fly with balloons or create a marble track from the attic through the house and end in the garden.

Pick an animal

A few weeks ago I found the site DIY.org, a social network to show off your DIY stuff. I know it’s not new but DIY focuses on children from the age of 7 and up and encourages parents to start earlier and guide them . The goal is to give an alternative to the scouts. In the scouts you can earn badges when you succeed some challenges, the goal here is to stimulate the kids to complete something and get a reward. The creators of DIY took these values and implemented them into a children friendly social media platform. I see the fear in your eyes but don’t be they really did a nice job.

It all starts with picking an animal mask, this mask will be the online avatar and a name generator gives your kid a new nickname. This procedure is used to avoid that children use there real identity and during it there are warnings about not picking a real name. The final step is to fill in the parents email address and another generator provides a new password. Next you as a parent get an email with an introduction and explanation and you have to permit that they can use the site, only then will the DIY profile be public.

There is also a parent dashboard where you can view the activity feed and change the account settings like email and passwords. If you have more children you can see all there activity and change the settings.

Get them inspired

There are a dozen skill badges your youngster can achieve like:

• Animator
• Animators create the illusion of movement using a series of images. from planning to stop-motion …
• Biologist
• Biologists are fascinated by the processes of life in all its forms.
• Camper
• Campers seek the wilderness. Wherever they are, may be their home, for they’re at home in nature building camps in house, outside, ice caves …
• Chef
• Through alchemy of fire and knife, a Chef brings out the best in food.
• Circuit Bender
• Circuit Benders can customize and hack technologies to do things they aren’t designed to do
• Gamer
• Computer games are powerful tools to design, build, cooperate, strategize, and lead.
• Hardware Hacker
• Hardware Hackers modify and create new types of electronic hardware.
• Gardener

• Gardeners keep soil, water, and sun in balance — bringing abundance and beauty to the land.
• Salvager
• A Salvager has a trained eye to see value and purpose where others see trash.
• And many more …

These are just a few of the skill you find on DIY, every skill has some challenges you have to achieve. The moment you have achieved 3 challenges of a skill you get a badge. Although it is still labeled “Coming Soon” it sure looks great to receive your embroidered patch in the mail.

The Effect

So now you are introduced let”s talk about how it works and what effect it triggers. Everybody has a profile, you can do two things. You can edit your profile and change the text and background color. Or you can add a project. This process is really simple, you give your project a title and upload some pictures which you can accompany by some caption text. Now go check out some skills with you kid, every skill challenge is provided with some examples. Seeing these examples makes them go “ahhhh & ohhhh” and ideas are coming out. The following reaction is a twister through your house of kids gathering all the thing they already have and make pictures of them and load them up on the DIY site.

After this “situation” it’s time to add the new created projects to a skill. When this is happened you have to wait a while because a real Skill master has to check if your submission is valid. With a little luck you make it to the home page as an Editor’s pick. Anyway there is a flood on projects your kids can do without your help. And lots more if they come of age.

Creative Kids

So the last days I have seen some great ideas and projects in the house here are a few of them. The best idea in my opinion was a combination of a TV show that was showed a few weeks ago about how to create a stop motion movie and seeing some LEGO creations.

LEGO Stop Motion Draw Studio.

The idea is quite clever, the issue is that you have to be at the same spot with your camera to make a stop-motion movie. Draw something take a picture and repeating this resulted in a series of images where the paper appeared on a different place in the image frame. The plan was to build a LEGO construction support to hold the camera / phone and a stage with border to put the paper against so it’s at the same location every time.

Submitted for the “Create an Animation Studio” challenge of the Animator Skill.

Toy from junk

This toilet paper robot his only purpose is to clean the house and this way help mommy so she has less work. This project made it as a “Editors Pick” and is approved for the SkillSalvager

Lego City

This LEGO city was submit and approved for the “Make a scale model structure” of the Fort BuilderSkill

Red Sea in a Bottle

This is a density project to see what happens when you mix oil with colored water.

Conclusion

In my opinion it’s a great project I already have seen some great stuff I want to do myself. Being a Social Media platform it’s still rather save for your kids and if you don’t agree with a project or the images you can hide and edit the pictures before making it public again. I see that the kids have more ideas and fantasy and try to solve daily things. While signing up I explained every step of it and explained why we don’t use our own name or why we use a password.

So am I happy yes, the kids use the computer for something else than playing games, they learned about a login and safety on the web, use the camera more serious and focused to snap the project from the right angle. Before taking pictures was just to click the button. And they want to finish what they have started because they have to take a picture of it and add to the site to hopefully get a badge.