World's First Interactive Project Gallery by Kids

[Maker Faire TO]

Kids love showing off their projects, and people love seeing them! We plan on displaying kids projects in our front window, and want to do it in a crowd-sourced, interactive and awesome way! We'll display projects made in our shop, and also encourage kids from around the world to send us their projects. This will give them their first opportunity to display their projects to the world and see reactions.

The MakerKids front store window will be set up with 9 squares in a 3x3 grid. The centre square will have an LCD touchscreen in it for controlling the display. It will use projected capacitive touch technology so that it will be interactive through the store window glass for people outside on the sidewalk. The 8 surrounding squares will contain projects. Each square will have LED lighting.

The touchscreen will first allow visitors to select a project square to view. This will turn on the LED lighting for that square, and activate any electronics. If the project uses the SparkCore arduino-compatible board, the interface onscreen will allow them to control it. For example, a dinosaur robot with servo-controlled toothy grin would allow the visitor to make it bite. The SparkCore API is very simple, and the kid who built the project will be able to easily make their project controllable with the interface.

A message will be displayed: "Like this project? Let the maker know! Send a tweet with the hashtag #MakerKidsWindowProject3 to @Maker_Kids and we'll forward it on to them! Don't forget to include a picture of your amazement!

Another button next to each of the 8 projects will allow the visitor to view reactions to it. This will display the twitter feed for the matching hashtag.

An accompanying web page on the MakerKids site will show a picture and the details of each of the 8 projects. If the project is SparkCore enabled, the visitor will be able to control it from the web page.

Kids can view the reactions at the store and online

Financé par Toronto (September 2013)