Hacky Halloween
Thanks to a $1000 grant from the KW Awesome Foundation, we will be conducting a pumpkin carving and learn-to-solder workshop for kids 8+.
Contents |
Meta-Bits
- Organizer
- Ben
- Participants
- ...
- Date
- Mid-to-late October, 2011
Who's doing what?
Materials needed
Tasks
Venue
The Museum: Saturday 29th October. The Museum opens at 10am. There will be a parallel pumpkin painting event for little kids, run by The Museum.
Pumpkins
co-ordinator: Doug Moen
We'll find a pumpkin farm or other vendor who is willing to bring pumpkins to the venue, sell them, and take back the unsold pumpkins. (We'd like to avoid this task ourselves.)
- Herrle's (doesn't have the staff or trucks to bring out and sell pumpkins. They recommended we try the Shantz family or a smaller pumpkin farm). They would sell us pumpkins at a wholesale price, though.
- Closest grocery store (Valu-Mart if we're at Waterloo Square)
Pumpkin carving knives
Co-ordinator: Steph
- Pumpkin carving kits from the dollar store?
- large spoons (if not included in kits)
- drop clothes (pref. newspaper)
- pails to collect compost material (where does the compost go?)
- Jeff says that dollar store pumpkin knives produce poor results. If we want to teach kids to do this: http://www.instructables.com/id/jeff-os-2008-pumpkins/ then we need knives like this: http://www.instructables.com/id/Pumpkin-Carving-Saws/ As for safety, he says not a problem, and has taught this to kids at a church workshop.
Electronics: the "pumpkin card"
James is working on a thru-hole design that incorporates an AVR microcontroller two LEDs (yellow and orange) and two AA batteries. Since the device will be programmable we can also have hacking kits & sessions later on at the lab.
Soldering irons, solder, LEDs, etc
One-page soldering comic: http://www.tvbgone.com/mfaire/soldercomic/soldercomic.pdf
- 6-10 soldering stations with 5 volunteers minimum
Publicity
Press release:
- Write and send it on to CTV, The Record, The Chronicle, and the UW and WLU papers.
- Alex W 22:31, 15 September 2011 (UTC)
Insurance
- Gus is looking into insurance we'll need for the event
- Maybe this depends on the venue. If we are one of the events at Science Open House, maybe we are covered by their insurance? Ditto for The Museum?
Budget and capacity planning
How much money are we spending per kid (cost of electronics, knife, etc)? What are the fixed costs (venue, possibly insurance)? Based on the foregoing, and a $1000 budget, how many pumpkin carvers can we support?
The current rough estimate is 100 kids.
Assuming each participant doesn't get a dedicated carving station (i.e., there will be rolling attendance), we also need to determine how many stations we can set up.
