Mural made of shattered mirrored glass on display.

Thank you, Coopersville!

Coopersville,

Thank you so much for a wonderful event. We explored many topics together, spent a lot of time actually getting our hands on the activities we might incorporate into our maker practice, and got to see some great sights together. Special thanks to the Coopersville High School for providing the meeting space for our event, Ryan Schoenborn for sharing his expertise and experience running an after-school STEM club, GVSU for sending some interesting tech and sharing their stories about maintaining a creative technology space inside a larger organization (and alongside many other responsibilities), and of course the Coopersville Area District Library for applying and inviting us to their area.

The time we spent at Coopersville, either in the workshop or the public event, we felt very connected and community-driven. People generally seemed to understand the connection that being a maker has to both the traditions of the area (seeing the woodworking area as a place to express that creative, purposeful energy, for example) and the needs of the community (which we felt in our conversations with the community at our very well attended MakerFest).

Here are some resources that you may find useful:

And some selected photos from our visit:

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A canoe suspended from the ceiling of the woodshop at the Coopersville High School.
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Ryan Schoenborn demonstrates one of the Michigan Department of Transportation Transportation and Civil Engineering (MDOT TRAC) STEM learning kits.
Peer learning at it's finest, two attendees learn the Scratch programming language.
Peer learning at it’s finest, two attendees learn the Scratch programming language.
A sample of the glorious, educational mess from the Coopersville MakerFest.
A sample of the glorious, educational mess from the Coopersville MakerFest.