Maker Jawn<\/a>, a program meant to provide the space and material for people of all ages to make things\u2014anything. While Antony struggles to resolve his missteps, Brooke, 9, builds a doll bed using wood scraps and a drill; Reyni, 10 uses a sewing machine to make a pillow; and Zainab and Kristen, 8 and 10, draw comics while discussing their school day. Zainab is wearing a skirt she made using the sewing machine earlier in the week. They are just five of the more than 25 kids who signed in at this Monday night session.<\/p>\n\u201cSee the reason I come is because at home I think of all these amazing things to do, but I can\u2019t do them without the supplies,\u201d says Antony, who hopes to one day become a mechanical engineer.<\/p>\n
Maker Jawn, run by the Free Library of Philadelphia, runs from 3 pm to 6 pm Monday through Thursday at most of its six locations in North Philadelphia, and from 1 pm to 4 pm on Saturdays. A Maker Mentor, a staff person with basic \u201cmaking\u201d knowledge, is always available to assist, offer suggestions, and sometimes offer one particular project. At the McPherson branch, an average of 36 people\u2014called \u201cmakers\u201d by staff\u2014attend each session. The goal, according to Program Manager Sarah Winchowky, is to create \u201ca safe place for people to tinker, to explore, to fail, and to try again.\u201d<\/p>\n
The program in its current form started in 2013, though the idea had been brewing for several years. In 2011, Digital Resource Specialists at the Free Library launched a \u201cTeen Media Week,\u201d funded by the Knight Foundation and hosted by computer labs through the library system with the goal of allowing teenagers to dabble in \u201ccreative technologies\u201d such as creating GIFs. An IMLS\/MacArthur grant in 2012 provided the library with the funds to build a learning lab in the Central Philadelphia location, which, with help from a national nonprofit called Maker Ed, jumpstarted the expansion of maker programming into library branches. Maker Jawn is currently supported by the National Writing Project, the Philadelphia City Institute, and NBC10.<\/p>\n
Maker Jawn aims to create safety\u2014a safe space to discuss and create ideas\u2014but also a safe space for kids after school away from the danger often associated with their neighborhoods. Bryan Belknap, a Maker Mentor at the McPherson branch, says that while helping makers develop functional math and literacy skills is crucial, he also counts a successful night as one where \u201ceveryone came, had fun, and is safe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Belknap has a loftier goal as well: the empowerment of young people, as demonstrated through the teen bike repair program, which students have handled from idea generation to supply orders to the actual repair of more than a dozen bikes this past summer. Exclusive to the McPherson branch, students bring in their own bikes or tell friends to bring in bikes, which they then fix in the basement of the library. They keep their tools, which range from a basic tire pump to a drill, in a large donated file cabinet.<\/p>\n
Making has long been a Philadelphia occupation\u2014though its manufacturing days are mostly a thing of the past. In the last few years, though, maker spaces like NextFab and Hive76 have popped up around the city, giving artists, creative professionals and hobbyists a place to tinker and make. Those places tend to cater towards the same population as many of the city\u2019s new ventures\u2014young Center City (or adjacent) professionals. Maker Jawn is taking that same idea and bringing it into neighborhoods, to people who might not otherwise have a similar opportunity.<\/p>\n
Read the full post at The Philadelphia Citizen<\/a>
\nphoto \/\/ Maker Jawn<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Antony, a 12-year-old seventh grader at Conwell Middle School in Port Richmond, has encountered a few unexpected barriers in testing his hypothesis. \u201cThere are several flaws,\u201d he says about the experiment he just built, a full water bottle with two straws hot glued into it, one of which is topped with a cardboard square. \u201cBut […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1214,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[137,126,40],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/youmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/youmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/youmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/youmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/youmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}