Why Maker Faire Orlando Needs a Local Educator: What My 5th Grade Class Taught Me
The PVC pipe rolled under my desk before I could grab it, and Javi huffed, wiping sweat off his upper lip with the back of his hand. It was 4:15 on a Tuesday in late September, 92 degrees outside, and my classroom AC was rattling so loud we could barely hear the notification ping from his beat-up Chromebook. Our after-school maker club had spent six weeks building low-cost flood sensors for neighborhoods like his grandma’s in Pine Hills, where her driveway floods ankle-deep every time a tropical storm rolls through. The sensor was supposed to send a text alert to her phone when water hit six inches, but the test run with a water bottle after lunch had shorted the whole circuit board. Ten minutes earlier, I’d gotten an automated reminder from the Maker Faire Orlando team: their volunteer educator coordinator role, open since the previous teacher retired and moved to Georgia in June, still hadn’t been filled. School group registration closed in three weeks.
I brushed a dried glob of hot glue off my lesson plan book and leaned over to look at the board. Javi’s thumb had a tiny, faint burn on the pad from a glue gun the week before, and he’d scribbled three pages of handwritten code notes in the margin of his math notebook—more writing than he’d turned in for all of September’s ELA assignments combined. He’s two grade levels behind in reading, gets sent to the office once or twice a month for arguing that worksheet work “doesn’t matter for anything real,” and until we started this project, he’d never stayed after school for anything optional.
I almost didn’t go to the volunteer info call for the open role the week before. I had 22 reading response journals to grade that night, my own 7-year-old had a soccer game across town, and I’d already signed up for three unpaid extra duties that semester to cover gaps at our small Title I elementary. I figured some retired STEM teacher with a garage workshop would jump on it, someone who didn’t spend their evenings answering parent emails while stirring mac and cheese. But I logged on from my car in the school parking lot after dismissal, and what I saw made the whole need click.
The core Maker Faire team is great—one guy builds robots out of old pinball machine parts, another makes 3D-printed prosthetics for rescue dogs out of a warehouse in Winter Park. They love making, and they want kids to be part of the fair, but none of them work in K-12 schools anymore. They kept framing the role as “someone to get teachers to sign up for booths,” like the hold-up was that we just didn’t know the fair existed. They offered free 10×10 booth space and said that was all most groups needed. I sat there in my front seat, watching a ladybug crawl across my steering wheel, and thought of all the barriers they weren’t seeing.
Last year, when Ms. Rita, the old educator coordinator, ran the K-12 school tent, we brought 12 kids from our club, and three other Title I schools from west Orange County joined us. Ms. Rita knew what teachers actually need, because she’d spent 30 years in 4th grade classrooms. She talked the district into donating free activity buses so we didn’t have to beg parents to carpool or pay for a charter out of our PTA budget. She got the fair to waive entry fees for all students and chaperones, no 10-page income verification form required. She booked the tent 50 feet from the main entrance, so the kid in our group with cerebral palsy didn’t have to navigate half a mile of uneven fairground gravel. She kept a bin behind the booth table with extra AA batteries, glue sticks, a backup soldering iron, and even a stack of paper towels and a bottle of spray cleaner for when someone spilled soda on their project 10 minutes before judging. None of that is glamorous. None of it requires an engineering degree. But if you haven’t herded 20 overexcited 10-year-olds through a field trip, you don’t think to do any of it.
That’s the part I’ve had to explain to a lot of parents this year, when district budget cuts put our after-school maker club on the chopping block for a semester. A lot of people see glue guns and PVC pipe and write it off as free play, something that gets cut when we need more time for reading test prep. But Javi didn’t just learn how a circuit works over these six weeks. He measured and re-measured the height of his grandma’s driveway three times, which taught him more about unit conversion than any worksheet. He watched 17 Arduino tutorials on YouTube, pausing to look up words he didn’t know, because he needed the code to work. He wrote a two-minute script to explain his project to fair judges, and practiced it out loud 12 times, even though he hates speaking in front of people. For kids who don’t fit the standard “sit still and fill out the packet” version of school, this is where they get to show up as the capable, creative people they are.
You don’t need a fancy home maker space to support that, either. I tell parents all the time: save your old cardboard boxes, broken (unplugged) toasters, and plastic sauce jars. Let your kid take stuff apart on the back porch. Ask them what small problem around your house or neighborhood they want to fix, instead of handing them a pre-packaged craft kit with step-by-step instructions. That’s it. No $300 3D printer required.
The open educator role isn’t a full-time job, either. It’s roughly five hours a week from September through the November fair, most of it answering teacher emails during your lunch break or adjusting registration forms. The work isn’t building big flashy projects. It’s cutting the 12-page booth application down to a single Google Form with five questions. It’s scheduling Q&As at 4pm on Wednesdays, when most teachers are still at their desks, instead of 10am on a Tuesday when we’re in the middle of math class. It’s setting aside blocks of free tickets and following up with schools that don’t have active PTA budgets, instead of waiting for schools in the wealthy east Orlando suburbs to sign up first. Right now, without that person in the role, the school groups that show up are mostly the ones with parent volunteers who work in engineering, who have trucks to haul projects and can take a Saturday off work without losing pay. The kids like Javi, the ones who need this most, get left in the classroom.
He showed up to club this Tuesday with a brand new circuit board he bought with $22 of his own allowance, and he soldered the connections himself after asking the 8th grade tech ed teacher for help during lunch. We filled a plastic tub with water from the classroom sink, hooked it up to his grandma’s old phone he uses for the project, and waited. 10 seconds after the water hit the six-inch mark, the screen lit up with a text alert. He whooped so loud the teacher next door banged on the wall to see what was wrong. That night, he showed me a text his abuela sent back: a blurry photo of a pot of pork tamales on her stove, with a voice note saying she’d make a whole batch for him if he got to bring the sensor to the fair.
I put my name in for the coordinator role last week. I still don’t know if I’ll get it, or if I can actually juggle the hours with grading, daycare pickup, and all the other small things that fill up a teacher’s week. The PVC frame for our booth is still wobbly, and Javi and Mia, who’s building self-watering planters out of old Disney souvenir cups, are still arguing about whether to paint it neon orange or UCF blue. Registration closes next Friday, and as of yesterday, the fair still hadn’t announced a hire. If I don’t end up doing it, I hope whoever takes the job walks into that first tent setup and remembers the tamales, and the glue burns, and the kid who doesn’t turn in writing homework but will spend three hours debugging code to keep his grandma’s shoes dry. That’s the work, really. Not the robots or the flashy 3D prints. Just showing up, and knowing what kids and teachers actually need to get their work out the door.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Maker Faire Orlando Needs a Local Educator: What My 5th Grade Class Taught Me