New York World Maker Faire 2017 – mini report!

Last weekend if you took a trip to the New York Hall of Science in Queens you’d have seen a massive, bustling event with thousands of people checking out weird and wonderful creations from people around the world. This is World Maker Faire, harkening somewhat back to World’s Fairs of old. It’s even located in the same venue as the famous 1964/1965 New York World’s Fair: it’s where Walt Disney debuted the ‘it’s a small world’ ride, and it’s also where the spaceships from Men in Black come from.

Raspberry Pi were there to promote the Pi as an educational computer, and with that in mind there was a new demo to try out. Kids (and many adults!) had to connect up Pis and components such as an LED and a button and then write a Python script to interact with them. To Pi and coder veterans, it was simple stuff, but to kids new to programming it was an eye-opening experience. Many children and educators went away over the weekend with a new-found love of programming and computing, which will hopefully spread to others.

Raspberry Pi weren’t the only exhibitors there, and we got around to seeing many cool things! There were robots of all shapes and sizes, cardboard pinball machines, home-made go kart racing, medical tech, arts and crafts, and even drone pilots zipping around an aerial course using VR headsets to see where they were going.

https://twitter.com/TheMagP1/status/912045083700187136

Over the next few weeks we’ll try and get some videos from Maker Faire up (including a timelapse booth-build and a hat-mounted camera walkaround of the Faire!) so you can see some of the great projects that were there. Also look forward to a more thorough report in a future issue of The MagPi!