TPiB: Sharpie Art! Quick and Easy Programming and MakerSpace Ideas

I’m not sure how it happened, but I am obsessed with Sharpies. They have proven to be very popular resources in our Teen MakerSpace. Yes, really. Whenever we have an activity in the Teen MakerSpace, we try to have corresponding books in the Teen MakerSpace. Sometimes we come up with an activity and search for support books, other times we find activities by browsing through the books in our Maker Collection.

There are several go to publisher’s that I search regularly to find maker related titles for our Maker Collection, and one of those publishers is Quarto books. We have a fairly large number of titles by them in the space and one of my favorites is this:

Sharpie Art Workshop has inspired a lot of fun quick and easy Maker activities for us in the Teen MakerSpace. One of the most popular has been our Sharpie Post It Note Art Gallery . . .

This title by Quarto is a good companion book for the Sharpie Art Workshop because it talks about lettering and has some coloring pages in the back.

In fact, there is a page of reading/book related book marks in the back which we used as the inspiration for our Sharpie Book Mark station recently.

We also have Sharpie Art Buttons as one of the challenges for our Button Making Station. Here are some examples of the artwork that our teens have created.

We also made small canvases available and the teens made some small canvas art. This robot is my favorite thing ever. The mini canvases cost about $1.47 at the local craft shop or you can buy a bulk order of Amazon for about $1.00 a canvas.

Here’s The Teen in action making a Sharpie Art Button.

We’re six months out now from creating our Teen MakerSpace and we have found that we like to have quick and easy activities to add. We have also found that they don’t have to always be tech heavy. In fact, many of our teens seem to enjoy drawing, coloring and more traditional crafts, so we are working on making sure to provide a variety of both tech and traditional crafts in our Teen MakerSpace. Sharpie art gives us a lot of easy options with just a few tools. And if you make sure and buy your Sharpies during a good sale, it’s not that expensive.

Doing Sharpie art has all been a good reminder for me that not all programming as to be elaborate and well planned. If teens seem to be bored, I can just bust out the Sharpies and challenge them to make something – anything. I’m always surprised by what they come up with.

Filed under: Makerspace, Teen Program in a Box, Teen Programming, Teen Programming in a Box, TPIB