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 1 Meta-Bits 2 Who's doing what? 3 Materials needed 4 Tasks 4.1 Venue 4.2 Pumpkin Team 4.3 Setup Team 4.4 Pumpkin carving knives 4.5 Electronics: the "pumpkin card" 4.6 Soldering irons, solder, LEDs, etc 4.7 Soldering Stations 4.8 Publicity 4.9 Insurance 4.10 Budget and capacity planning 4.11 Event Management (on the day of)

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.

Pumpkin Team

co-ordinator: Doug Moen

Nauman's Farm will give us 100 pumpkins for $250. Pumpkin team picks them up at 9am (verify), returns unused pumpkins and pumpkin waste to farm for composting.

Karl: Honda Element

Need: truck

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)

Setup Team

set up tables at Museum.

James, Agnes

Pumpkin carving knives

Co-ordinators: Steph, Jeff

• 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.

Carving team will supervise and teach pumpkin carving.

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

Soldering Stations

• James can provide 2 stations
• the lab can provide 2
• Ben can provide 1 (ask him)
• email list for other people who can lend a soldering station (not a firestarter)

rubber mats, so that work doesn't move around while soldering

lighting: should be fine

Soldering team will supervise and teach soldering. It would be good to have a dry run/practice session

Publicity

Press release:

• Write and send it on to CTV, The Record, The Chronicle, and the UW and WLU papers.
• Banner on our front page
• 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.

Event Management (on the day of)