Tales from a Loud Librarian

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted and asked if Bird Brain Technologies could use a picture that I took of my students' Finch  robot running through a maze. The company were building a new website and wanted the picture for that site. I was flattered. My school has purchased two Finches, but I won a grant from Bird Brain Tech for the loan of twenty finches for three months. With this grant, I am able to keep one of the Finches for the library.  Dueling Finches The Finches are a robot with a very, very, very long cable that connects via USB to a computer. The students can use various coding languages to make the Finch do what they want. My students used Snap from UC Berkeley. You can see our Finch in action on their website here . 

I really don't know what the students did in the library before we received all the gadgets and tools for our makerspace. Every day at lunch students are engaged in making and creating in collaboration with each other. It is fun to watch the students so excited, and they are having a blast.  Students who don't usually spend their time in here during lunch are visiting to have a go with the 3D pen. We bought the one from 7Tech, and it is working very well for us. I currently have only one pen, and we are waiting on delivery of two more. I think this is going to be a great tool for the kids to sit around, chat, and create together.  Fun with the 3D pen Students visit the library just to draw with the 3D pen, glad to have them The students used the Bird Brain Robot Server to access Snap to program the Finch Robot. Scratch works too, but you need the Scratch offline editor downloaded on the computer to do the programming. We downloaded the robot server, ...