Take a vacant lot near a neighborhood. Theme it to a kids book {“The Wild Robot”} . Build large size characters and scenes from the book. Schedule events and activities for 8 weeks. That is a Literary Lot (https://www.literarylots.org/ ).
Okay , it isn’t quite that simple. You need lots of sponsors and volunteers and lots of coordination of people and events : Friday night movies ; Writing Workshops ; Story Time ; Art Workshops ; Cooking Demo’s ; Karaoke ; Lyric Writing ; Chess ; Golf ; Cleveland Orchestra (one instrument) ; Robot building ... ![]()
I only heard about this a couple of weeks ago when Kauser got in touch with me via a mutual contact. They needed someone to finish up the year running the Maker Shed, which was new to #LiteraryLots. In the shed were 4 3D printers, 2 Cameo vinyl cutters, a heat press, 1 epilog laser cutter, and 3 PC’s. There was a generator to power this, and some of the other events at the lot. That did not leave any workspace, something to work on for next year.
There were some successes and mis-steps with the MakerShed. It was hard to come in to somebody else’s equipment with no instructions on how to use or care. Even though I use 3D printers, each one has nuances. But we got kids on them and printed some things and had fun. The laser was not as cooperative. The blower for it was not working (no idea why not, impeller moves, but motor just hums), so I wasn’t too keen on really making much. We did some acrylic name plates on the first day. The second day I tried to load a Corel Draw file from my flash drive, and that sent the computer into an endless loop of “Visual C ++ Runtime Error” and “Windows Explorer Needs to Close”... so the computer would not let us run anything. A shed, in a vacant lot, is not a great place to trouble shoot someone else’s computer. I then had to figure out Silhouette Software and the Cameo to make some stickers and t-shirts, also the heat press. Got that figured out, and made Roz stickers to give away. On the last day I was there, kids designed things to put on their shirts, Cameo cut them, and I heat pressed them. (I made some shirts for myself since I had access to the Cameo and heat press). I also left some robot iron ons in case someone wanted to run the heat press on the final weekend. I was there for 7 days, usually for 4-5 hours. Except the massive storm day , then only 2 hours and got drenched. When I was at the lot, there were never many kids, really only 2-5 “regulars”. Who knows why...time of day, not enough activities scheduled, lack of knowledge of schedule. Often they just wanted to play with the water hoses and climb. On t-shirt day a mother brought her two kids, and that was the first time they had come to the lot (week 8 of the summer). It is a really nice concept that could be adapted to any location. Not sure how to make it “hopping” all day. I hope to talk with the organizer to learn more and talk ideas. pictures below :
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