Month: February 2014

CAMEO MAKES A CAMEO

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On February 25, 2014

This week, we continued with many of the same activities (sewing, story writing, scrap box, and independent projects), but a new addition from last week was the Cameo, which is basically a printer that cuts out shapes instead of printing things. Students layout designs or letters in the software for the Cameo, and then insert the appropriate paper with a plastic backing. The machine has a little knife inside that cuts along the path that the student made and the final output is… A Sticker! After one class with the Cameo, one of our students, Malek, took over teaching others how to use the Cameo!
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Scary Faces with the Cameo(2/24/14)!

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On February 24, 2014

We had a lot of fun working with the Cameo last week. Last week(2/24/14) everyone started learning how to work with the Cameo Design Studio and got the hang of it really fast. We covered the basics of tracing images, adding text, grouping, ungrouping, and welding. We had two Makers create some awesome scary faces. You may recognize one of them as Jack Skellington from the film The Nightmare Before Christmas!

Cameo Creations(2/17/14)!

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On February 21, 2014

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We made some awesome stickers with silver contact paper and the always fabulous Cameo again this week. There was a clear trend this week as all the boys went for basketball related. Everything from Nike and Jordan logos, to a “BASKETBALL FOR LIFE” sticker. Everyone had a lot of fun experimenting with different shapes and got to learn a bit more about how to weld, group, and ungroup objects in the Cameo Design Studio.

Little Bits Fun with James!

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On February 21, 2014

Everyone was bobbing there heads along as James and a few makers created some awesome tunes with Little Bits.

Dracula and vampires, what could be better?

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On February 21, 2014

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Check out this awesome comic above, one of our very creative makers made with Pixton last Monday!

Pixton, PicMonkey, KORG, Cameo, and Tons of New Faces!

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On February 11, 2014

Hello all, we had a lot of fun at Willow Run yesterday and best of all we saw a ton of new faces and some returning ones as well at Michigan Makers! We had four super fun activities to choose from:

1. Pixton
2. PicMonkey
3. KORG
4. Cameo

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The results have been tallied from last week and one of the top three voted activities was making your own comics! So this week we decided to introduce Pixton, a fun creative way to easily make your own comics online! Pixton allows for tons of customization so each maker was able to make their comic unique and put their own personal touch on it to make it theirs.
One of the other top three voted activities from last week was photo/video editing, so we had the makers experiment with PicMonkey! PicMonkey is an awesome free photo editor online. Not only did some makers edit photos with text, lighting, and overlays, but some made collages as well. And PicMonkey has the awesome feature of allowing you to start from a blank canvas so you can make your own design. Some of our drawing enthusiasts choose this option.

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After being out for a while the Cameo is back is in action! I have three words for you: silver contact paper. And yes it was as awesome as it sounds. The makers printed out their designs on silver contact paper and made them into stickers, how cool is that! While we just worked with cutting out pre-designed objects this time, next time we’ll start having each maker brainstorm their own design and bring that to life on the cameo.

NEW WORLD

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On February 11, 2014

cool song i made its a really awesome song so its about me in minecraft doing minecraft stuff! 😀
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW8sq_SP2Tc

By: Andy Tucker

SECRET KEYBOARD STUFF

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On February 11, 2014

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Comments
me!!!-i wrote this article

BEAN BAGS AND VIRTUAL LEGOS

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On February 8, 2014

This week our menu included sewing, marble-run-making, choose-your-own-adventure-story writing, bean bag making, and virtual Legos. Virtual Legos? What?! It’s true, right here with Build with Chrome. Unfortunately, we had some difficulties using Build with Chrome on the school laptops. Apparently a certain plug-in for Google Chrome kept crashing, but hopefully, we’ll find a way to fix that.

For the bean bags, very patient students took turns learning how to use the sewing machine to make a pocket. They then turned it inside out so that the seam was on the inside, filled the pocket with dried beans, and sewed the top closed. We need to learn not to throw the bean bags at each other, however. We don’t want anyone to get hurt.

Some students took matters into their own hands and independently made things, which is, of course, fantastic! Here is an example: a stop-motion animation that Vickie made.

The 3D printer that we were all excited to use last class unfortunately was not working for this class. We’ll try to have it fixed before next time.

 

Mitchell Stop-Motion 6Feb2014

Exciting New Happenings at Michigan Makers

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On February 3, 2014

Wow it’s been a while since we’ve been at Willow Run because of all the horrible weather but today we were finally back in action with some exciting new changes! We had five super fun stations that each lasted about 15 minutes and then everyone rotated stations so they got do do a little bit of everything. One of our lovely mentor’s Alyssa coined it “speed-making”. We also introduced a punch card, each time you went to a different station and completed an activity you got a punch on your card.
So what exciting new activities did we have this week? Here’s what the menu looked like for today (February 3rd):

Station 1: Origami, Legos, and Drawing with Amelia
Station 2: LittleBits and KORG for digital music making with James and Mollie
Station 3: Badge-O-Matic with Alyssa
Station 4: 3D Printing with Mari and Kristen
Station 5: Sewing Bean Bags with Amana and Meg 

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At the origami station we made a rainbow wheel as pictured to the left. The rainbow wheel makes a great decoration on top of a box or card. We also had a ton of fun designing lego cars like the one below made by a very creative maker. At the origami station there were tons of “How to Draw” books so a few makers started designing their buttons at this station using the drawing books for a little inspiration. 

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I think it’s safe to say the runaway hit of the day was the awesome Badge-O-Matic. No one could resist getting to make personalized buttons! Every Michigan Maker Mentor got a button as well with their name on it so we can all work on getting to know each other better. Check out some of the button designs below! A big thanks to the School of Information for letting us borrow the Badge-O-Matic.
And lastly, we can’t forget we bid a sad farewell to long time Michigan Makers Mentor Meg Morrissey, but for a great reason: she got a new job! Congratulations Meg, we wish you all the best of luck in your new endeavors!

Copyright and Funding Information

Images © 2015 Regents of the University of Michigan. Text made available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license unless otherwise stated. This project was made possible in part by the Institute of​ ​Museum and Library Services RE-05-15-0021-15.

Making with Michigan Makers

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Images © 2015 Regents of the University of Michigan. Text available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license unless otherwise stated. This project was made possible in part by the Institute of​ ​Museum and Library Services RE-05-15-0021-15.