Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab

We regularly host workshops for interested community groups. Before you contact us to request a workshop, please note the following:

Our Fab Lab is primarily volunteer run. This means we need your help to make this place what it is!

There are a few great ways you can get involved:

I had the pleasure of presenting twice this past week at the Fab8nz conference via video conference. Among many things we discussed research in Fab Labs related to literacy, learning and empowerment as well as the Powers of 10 concept and how we've gone about doing mini FabLab deployments. If you're interested the paper and one of the presentations is available for download below!

To better serve and invest in our local community the Fab Lab has partnered with several anchor institutions to help introduce people (especially kids) to the process of making. We are helping them to set up their own maker spaces as well as coordinating a variety of collaborations, including workshops, outreach events and consultation. We also continue to retain connections to the global and national Fab Lab community.

How do I get started with Silhouette Studio?

CUC-FABLAB Electronics Summer Workshop (Lead Instructor: Mercedes Mane)
July 9th, July 16th, and July 23rd from 9am-12pm

Join a series of workshops this summer at the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab and learn how to use Eagle to design circuits, use the Modela milling machine to cut circuit boards and use an Arduino and FabISP to program your “Hello World” board to blink and play music. The sessions are independent and you can pick and choose any of them or do them all.

See attached flyer for details.

To enroll, please e-mail Mercedes Mane. 

CUCFL Summer Sessions:  2011

The Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab is pleased to announce a series of classes for Summer 2011.  Classes will be taught by Fab Lab experts.   Send inquiries and enrollments to Betty Barett (bb1@illinois.edu).  Fees will be collected at the class. Please notes these classes are all pilots so the enrollment is limited. 

Squishy Circuits  (Lead Instructor: Lauren Semararo)

June 4 – from 10:00 to noon for kids aged 8 to 12 (limit 8) 

Squishy Circuits is a fun introduction to electricity and how it works. We will use playdoh and electronic components to help kids begin to learn how electricity works and what it takes to create a basic circuit.  Each child will receive two kinds of playdoh and the components needed to create their own project that lights up. 

Class fee (includes materials) $20.00

Hey! That’s MY  water bottle (Lead Instructor: Steve Holt)

June 11 – from 10:00 to 12:00 for kids from 8 to 17 (limit 8)

Create a personalized  aluminum water bottle by making your own design and engraving it on the laser cutter.  In addition, staff will help the students make vinyl stickers or a water bottle holder to take home.   We will provide the bottles and other materials but you have to provide the ideas! 

Class fee (includes  materials)  $20.00

Rock your Ride

June 18 – from 10:00 to 3:00 for kids from 13 to 17 (limit 8) (Lead Instructor: Luke Scharf)

Wash your bike and bring it to the lab.  We’ll help you make it even more awesome with reflective materials to create decals and striping as well as a couple of varieties of lights.  Kids will create a theme and then design the electric and visual components to make their bikes safer in the dark and really cool.  We will have a variety of high and low tech materials to choose from as well as the tools needed.  Each student should bring a lunch and we’ll provide some snacks and beverages. 

Class fee (includes materials and snacks)  $40.00

Mary K Watson writes:

The first presentation at the United States Fab Lab Network (USFLN) Annoual Symposium in Kansas City was done by the Rapid Tech.org which has the Bright Minds Mentoring program with teacher training workshop for educators They have four days of hands on experience to learn the secondary processes for using the machines and then how to use it in the classroom as well as industry seminars for companies. They have opened a fab lab and Fox Valley works with them on prototyping development.

These are some of the other presenters:

Monday, January 3 at 6:00pm, in the Fab Lab meeting area. Meeting to finalize Urbana Arts Grant application.

NOTICE

A DISCUSSION ON FAB ACADEMY HOSTING & PARTICIPATION FOR SPRING 2011 AT CHAMPAIGN-URBANA COMMUNITY FAB LAB WILL BE HELD ON THURSDAY DECEMBER 2 @ 5:30 PM

THE PROGRAM:
http://academy.cba.mit.edu/about/index.html

A Fab Academy prep video (Fab Lab videoconference at mcu.cba.mit.edu) is set for 9:00 am Boston time over the polycom next week on Tue Dec 7 - attend if you can!

RSVP