MakerSpace: Tech Take Apart

If you’re library is like mine, you probably have a lot of old, nonfunctional tech laying around that you are waiting to discard. Don’t discard it – use it! One of my favorite activities to do with teens is Tech Take Apart.

It’s really as simple as it seems, you give the teens some tools (and protective eye wear!) and let them take the tech apart to see what the inside looks like.

And if you want to be really creative, you can give them a hot glue gun and let them make “robots” out of the tech pieces. Granted, these are not functional robots – though there is not reason that the teens couldn’t try to make functional robots. For example, they could combine them with LittleBits to make a moving part(s).

And here’s a bunch of cool photos from our recent Tech Take Apart Day at The Teen MakerSpace at The Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County (OH).

If you wanted to let teens hack your old computers and not just take them apart to make robot art, you can look at these two books to start with.

We were recently super impressed because we had two broken 3D pens and a teen took them both apart and used pieces from one to fix the other. He turned 2 broken 3D pens into one working 3D pen. It was a beautiful thing.

Filed under: Makerspace