Maker Faire Lille

Maker Faire Lille is this weekend, Friday through Sunday in northwest France. It is held on the site of a former textile factory that is now an innovation campus. Maker Faire Lille is organized by Leroy Merlin (the Home Depot of France with HQ in Lille) who is also holding mini Maker Faires in 100 of their stores on Saturday.

On Thursday, I gave a talk to several hundred Leroy Merlin employees, many of whom were unfamiliar with the Maker Movement. My talk was titled “Twenty Years of Make: —From DIY to AI.” I told stories of makers and their projects and two of them were French makers — Benjamin Cabé who told us about developing an AI nose to detect different smells, and Gael Langevin who created the open-source InMoov humanoid robot and how he was working to add facial expressions to his robot, which was featured in the current issue of Make:.

Today, on Friday, there was an opening ceremony with local officials and myself welcoming makers. Like many Maker Faires, Maker Faire Lille on Friday opened for school children to interact with makers and have hands-on experiences.

Basic Making

Kids had a lot of hands-on activities to do at Maker Faire Lille. At the Giant Workshop tent, the kids were cutting PVC pipe and making a kind of marshmallow shooter — although these were designed to shoot a paper cap. The facilitator — today it was Fabian — stands atop the tables like a conductor urging forty students to play with PVC pipes. They seemed to take to this project.

Atelier is a French word for workshop. Fabian explained that “Les Ateliers Jonck” is his own business — “Jonck” means “young” and it is a portion of his longer surname “Jonckheere”, which in Belgian means “youngman.” On Saturday, he will not be at Maker Faire Lille because he has to deliver a project that he has been working on — an accurate scale model of an operating windmill to be installed at a historical site.

Elsewhere, I saw kids enjoying this simple activity — hammering a nail into a board. They got a Makey sticker for completing the task. It’s simple but it’s not as easy as it looks.

In the Leroy Merlin booth, kids were busy learning to saw.

Kids were using tools from Makedo to cut sections of cardboard and attach them to each other.

Some design students had made their own cardboard creations the day before. I particularly liked this spiky igloo.

It’s made from two basic shapes — triangles and a connector piece that’s pointed on one end and round on the other.

Tinker Robot Labs

I met Pedro Martinez who runs Tinker Robot Labs. He said his goal is “to help kids who have nothing become engineers.” He offers robotic classes remotely, reaching students in Africa, Latin America, and throughout Europe. “I’m teaching at 4am sometimes,” he said.

Pablo was born in Spain but now lives near Paris. After losing a job in tech, he decided to start his own business teaching robotics. Pablo’s bio is rather interesting:

Bertrand Baudry, Maker Faire Lille Producer

Bertrand Baudry, who works for Leroy Merlin, is the producer of Maker Faire Lille. He and his team members such as Justine deserve a shoutout for organizing the event with over 600 exhibits at the EuraTechnologies campus. The people behind the scenes make a Maker Faire possible and I really appreciate their dedication.

Giant Workshop is Bertrand’s idea and he debuted it first at Maker Faire Paris in 2018. There were maybe sixty people sitting around the long table while a facilitator offered instruction and encouragement. We did Giant Workshop at Maker Faire Bay Area in 2019.

For more information, visit lille.makerfaire.com.