Physical computing blocks at Maker Faire New York

At events like Maker Faire New York, we love offering visitors the chance to try out easy, inviting, and hands-on activities, so we teamed up with maker Ben Light to create interactive physical computing blocks.

Getting hands-on experience at events

At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we often have the opportunity to engage with families and young people at events such as Maker Faires and STEAM festivals. When we set up a booth, it’s really important to us that we provide an educational, fun experience for everyone who visits us. But there are a few reasons why this can be a challenge.

Girls use the physical computing blocks at Maker Faire New York

For one, you have a broad audience of people with differing levels of experience with computers. Moreover, some people want to take the time to learn a lot, others just want to try something quick and move on. And on top of that, the environment is often loud, crowded, and chaotic…in a good way!

Creating our physical computing blocks

We were up against these challenges when we set out to create a new physical computing experience for our World Maker Faire New York booth. Our goal was to give people the opportunity to try a little bit of circuit making and a little bit of coding — and they should be able to get hands-on with the activity right away.

Inspired by Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio, we sketched out physical computing blocks which let visitors use the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins without needing to work with tiny components or needing to understand how a breadboard works. We turned the sketches over to our friend Ben Light in New York City, and he brought the project to life.

Father and infant child clip crocodile leads to the Raspberry Pi physical computing blocks at Maker Faire New York

As you can see, the activity turned out really well, so we hope to bring it to more events in the future. Thank you, Ben Light, for collaborating with us on it!

6 comments

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It is great that young children can learn new technologies.
I hope to use raspberry pi in my project, too.
Thanks.

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I want that branding iron! :-)
This is seriously cool. Even the labels are retro.

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We absolutely love the branding iron. While filming this video, we spent far too much time branding pieces of scrap wood.

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Will you be releasing plans for the various blocks?

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Is there any way to get some documentation on what you did so that we might be able to replicate this in our school outreach projects for the community college I work at?
And yes, I would like the opportunity to get the branding iron also!

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I´m totally doing it! I love it, I already use CIrcuit boards in my workshops!!

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