A routine visit to Spark Fun’s website yesterday turned up this announcement on their upcoming 50-state National Tour.
http://www.sparkfun.com/news/1073
https://learn.sparkfun.com/tour
With a little bit of effort, we could work to make HIVE13 and Cincinnati be their first choice stop in Ohio. With a bit more effort, we could coordinate with our hackerspace cousins in nearby Louisville, Indianapolis, and Detroit to make it easy and fun for Spark Fun to visit four midwest regional sites all around the same time. Coordinating with other hackerspaces also helps prep us to get their support for our upcoming October Cincinnati MakerFaire.
All details are not yet known, but if HIVE13 is one of the first 50, the cost is $1500 instead of $2500. We could front the money, and/or launch a crowd-funding site like FundRazr or IndieGoGo to get donations and committed pool money. It looks like a 1-day, all-day workshop (likely in August 2013) with enough hardware for 20-40 students/teams. Quick math shows that’s something in the range of $37 to $125 per student to reserve a seat. If we somehow do not sell all seats, we still end up with three types of excess hardware kits and can “train-our-trainers” to replicate the workshops ourselves at a later time. Maybe we outreach and sponsor honorariums to Cincinnati area elementary, middle, and high school educators (as no-cost guests of HIVE13) so they can be trained to be the trainers to carry the experience to a wider pool of kids into next year?
It all sounds good to me. What does the membership say? Can we agree to get on board early?
Jim
What does the membership think?
