A High-tech County Fair At The Maker Faire 2006

Over here at QJ, we smile upon innate ingenuity… that’s why it saddened me to find out that an inventor’s dream fair was held and I wasn’t there to witness it! Quarterly inventor’s magazine Make celebrated virtuosity with the weekend’s Maker Faire 2006 held at the San Mateo Fairgrounds, San Mateo California. Attended by almost 20,000 people ranging from the very young to the old, Maker Faire was your high-tech version of a county fair, featuring DIY inventions, workshops, and activities where participants learned how to “make everything from paper airplanes to robots”.

Attendees were amazed by The Cubicle’s ‘Fire’ Truck, which doubled as a platform for teaching welding, torch cutting, blacksmithing and glass flame working workshops; robots slinging miniature tennis balls in a hockey-like game designed by Stanford Mechatronics students; a remote-controlled humanoid robot doing back flips; ZAP!’s free test drive of its three-wheeled electric vehicle Xebra; and so much more.

The event also appealed to people who has inventor dreams as a couple of workshops actually let people create their own ‘inventions’. There were workshops on robot hacking, pin-hole photography, water rockets, and dozens of other unique DIY projects. It was but expected that the Maker Faire drew in some of the tech industry’s bigwigs – Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Google co-founder Larry Page, and Make Magazine publisher Dale Dougherty were all present. It sounded really fun. Dang… next year, I’m so there.
  

Over here at QJ, we smile upon innate ingenuity… that’s why it saddened me to find out that an inventor’s dream fair was held and I wasn’t there to witness it! Quarterly inventor’s magazine Make celebrated virtuosity with the weekend’s Maker Faire 2006 held at the San Mateo Fairgrounds, San Mateo California. Attended by almost 20,000 people ranging from the very young to the old, Maker Faire was your high-tech version of a county fair, featuring DIY inventions, workshops, and activities where participants learned how to “make everything from paper airplanes to robots”.

Attendees were amazed by The Cubicle’s ‘Fire’ Truck, which doubled as a platform for teaching welding, torch cutting, blacksmithing and glass flame working workshops; robots slinging miniature tennis balls in a hockey-like game designed by Stanford Mechatronics students; a remote-controlled humanoid robot doing back flips; ZAP!’s free test drive of its three-wheeled electric vehicle Xebra; and so much more.

The event also appealed to people who has inventor dreams as a couple of workshops actually let people create their own ‘inventions’. There were workshops on robot hacking, pin-hole photography, water rockets, and dozens of other unique DIY projects. It was but expected that the Maker Faire drew in some of the tech industry’s bigwigs – Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Google co-founder Larry Page, and Make Magazine publisher Dale Dougherty were all present. It sounded really fun. Dang… next year, I’m so there.