Under one pavilion, kids get a first taste of how to solder electronics, while inside the main building, a group called ArcAttack makes music with half-million-volt Tesla coils.
In short, it's Maker Faire, a three-day event in September that brings artists, engineers, crafters, and mad scientists together to share their joy of creating. And increasingly, it's kids who are doing the mad science.
Among them stands 14-year-old Joe Hudy, a self-professed "maker," with a massive pneumatic marshmallow cannon to prove it. He's been constructing his own fun for as long as he can remember, and the reason is simple, Joe says: "People just love to build things."
David Giancaspro, a writer for Wired magazine's GeekDad website, believes that people – adults and kids alike – have a natural urge to want to build things. "As we've moved further and further away from that, towards what people call 'knowledge work,' as opposed to producing something physical, that urge is starting to come back," he says.
For Joe, Mr. Giancaspro, and other makers, this primal urge struck at a wonderful time. Lots of once-expensive electronics have now become low-cost toys for tinkerers. For example, Giancaspro points to the Arduino single-board microcontroller. The board, available for around $30, allows budding inventors to embed computer controls into anything from homemade robots to color-changing origami lanterns like the ones the Wired writer designed himself.
"The Arduino really lowered the bar of how much you needed to know just to get some interesting electronics going," he says.
Recently, inexpensive 3-D "printers" have also made creating things more accessible. These devices generate physical objects, such as small figurines or parts, by squirting out plastic or resin to build up objects layer by layer, all according to a computer model.
As more makers spread their wings, corporate America is starting to take notice.
