Maker Camp inspires innovation through music

Maker Camp is a four day camp for middle school age kids where they learn things like digital and physical prototyping as well as coding and circuitry and then build something entirely new. This year's challenge is each team was assigned a client who is an employee of the library who gave them requirements for a musical instrument that they wanted to have designed and built for them. We're making an instrument that has to be able to be used by a person who has hand mobility issues. I'm making a maraca and some people are making like drums or a string instrument and we're gonna put them on base like a puzzle piece sort of. Me and my team are building a kind of green bean that is like shaped like that. It has three drums in it. When you hit it, it triggers a button which plays a sound and it's a different sound for each of the drums. At this age, kids are so incredibly creative. They have lots of ideas that I would never even think of, but they also have this capacity to learn all kinds of new skills like coding and circuitry and prototyping so that they can make those ideas come to life and make really beautiful strange and amazing things. I think once you get to like higher education like creativity ends up being very limited you have a lot of restrictions to work with but seeing these kids just kind of shout out random ideas and like not use any AI tool, no ChatGBT, it's just pure like creativity from their own brain and it's just really impressive to see like how creative they are with you know no external resources. I hope more than anything that they see themselves as creators and recognize that their ideas are worth making reality.