Pop! Phoning it in for fun at the SLO Mini-Maker Faire
Grownups, children and makers of all ages used their smart phones to play a game inspired by carnival clowns at the first annual San Luis Obispo Mini Maker Faire on May 11, 2013.
Posts from the ‘Cal Poly Science Café’ Category
May 14
May 13
Yerba mate for the world!
What’s green, full of caffeine, and on a mission to rebuild the rainforest? Our Guayaki! Science Cafe guests will tell you, it’s yerba mate!
Last week Cal Poly Science Cafe hosted Ana Yazdi and Michael Newton of Guayaki, who shared this traditional South American beverage with us, as well as its health benefits and the company’s mission to use Guayaki’s success to give back to the environment. They shared hot and cold beverages with the community, and their business model of working with native people in South America to harvest mate sustainably.
Nerd entrepreneurs, bro entrepreneurs, and inspiration at Cal Poly
I like to think I’m an old hat at Science Cafes. After all, I’ve worked at Kennedy Library for eight months, and already worked two Science Cafes. I should have mastered it, right? Of course, just when I feel like I know what to expect, a Cal Poly Science Café comes along to prove to me just how unique each library event is. Read more
Feb 25
Crowd-sourced gaming with Cal Poly Science Café at SLO Mini Maker Faire
Cal Poly Science Café at Kennedy Library offers interactive experiences with an expert – taste coffee, build an imaginary city with found objects, offer ideas on how to collect E.coli samples – and now, be a part of a crowd-sourced game at SLO Mini Maker Faire!
UPDATE: It happened! You can read (and watch all about it on Out Loud). Read more
Feb 13
CSI: E. coli
The last creature I would ever think to fingerprint would be an E. coli microbe. First, it doesn’t have fingers. And second, it’s gross. But then again, I’m not biological sciences professor Chris Kitts, who has pioneered the Cal Poly Library of Pyroprints (CPLOP) and spends much of his time helping biological sciences students fingerprint the gross, fingerless little bacteria.
Why?
Jan 3
Being loud at TEDxUCLA
In the fall I was lucky to travel to UCLA to talk about… well, basically about what I’ve learned so far from working at this library. The talk is called Libraries Can Be Loud, which I meant literally and metaphorically. I illustrated the story of what I’ve learned through the tale of a particularly adventurous Cal Poly Science Cafe. It involved a bunch of stuff I still don’t understand — how arduinos and code can work together with the internet to make an interactive game that involves tin cans, helium balloons, live scoring and a lot of fun throwing tennis balls down our iconic concrete staircase. You can read more about that day elsewhere.
Oct 23
On Foot! Adventures in city planning
The found objects included scraps of paper, foam hair curlers and plastic dinosaurs. The task? To build an ideal city using these disparate objects. With minimal instruction to encourage creative thinking, 140 people began building. They stood around tables in the second floor cafe area, working together to make cities unlike the ones we know, limited only by their imagination and plastic dinosaurs.
