Why Maker Faire Orlando Needs More K-12 Educators (And What Kids Gain From It)
The coffee in my reusable Orlando Science Middle cup had gone lukewarm by 9:17 a.m. last October, and I was already out of extra wire strippers. I’d agreed to cover my school’s booth at Maker Faire Orlando two days earlier, after my teammate came down with a sinus infection that knocked her flat. I’d packed the bin of LED throwies, cardboard Rube Goldberg parts, and half-finished solar phone chargers my 7th graders built the week before, but I’d never worked a booth alone, and I’d assumed we’d get a slow first hour as families filtered through the Orange County Convention Center doors. I was wrong. A line of eight kids snaked past the neighboring 4-H robotics table before opening announcements finished, and halfway down that line was a kid in a faded T-Rex hoodie, picking at a loose thread and staring at his sneakers.
His mom leaned around him when they reached the table, keeping her voice quiet. “That’s Javi, he’s 8. He takes apart every old remote and broken toy in our garage, puts them back together in weird configurations. But his teacher says he never follows project directions, and he refuses to enter the school art show because everything he makes is ‘wrong.’ I thought he’d like this, but he gets nervous if people tell him what to do.”
I nodded. I see Javi every semester in my 7th grade science class, usually labeled “unmotivated” or “easily distracted.” I grabbed a 9-volt battery, one red LED, a neodymium magnet, and a 6-inch strip of masking tape and set them in front of him, no instruction sheet. “There’s no right thing to make here,” I said. “If it doesn’t light up or stick, we can mess with it until it does. I’ll be right over if you need something.”
He stood there for 11 minutes by my count, not talking, twisting the LED’s thin metal leads between his fingers. He connected the leads to the wrong battery terminals first, and when nothing lit up, he frowned and flipped them around without asking for help. When the LED glowed red, he taped the whole assembly straight to the T-Rex’s eye on his hoodie, then looked up and smiled for the first time. He was going to make 10 more, he said, for his whole Halloween costume.
After he walked away, I leaned against the table and looked across the fair floor. Most booths were run by hobbyist makers, local tech company engineers, college engineering students, and 4-H teams. All knew their way around 3D printers or saws or circuit boards, but barely any spent 40 hours a week around kids, the way I do. Later that afternoon, the fair’s volunteer coordinator stopped by with extra water, and told me they’d entered the weekend 28 educators short of their goal. They put out the call every year, she said, but most teachers assume they need advanced engineering or design skills to help, or simply don’t have extra weekend energy after a full week of class.
I saw what that gap means a couple hours later, at the 3D printing booth run by a local manufacturing firm. A 9-year-old girl named Lila left crying, after three different engineers tried to walk her through a beginner CAD tutorial for a custom keychain. They kept taking the mouse from her to fix her “mistakes,” and she got frustrated and quit. I waved her over, handed her corrugated cardboard and two brass fasteners, and 20 minutes later she handed me a folding cardboard keychain that pulled out into a tiny bookmark. She didn’t care that it wasn’t 3D printed. She just wanted to make something that worked the way she wanted, without anyone fixing it for her.
That’s the gap classroom educators fill, even if we can’t design a CAD model or solder a custom circuit board. We spend all day watching kids: noticing when a kid picking at their sleeves isn’t misbehaving, they’re just taking time to process. Knowing when to step back and let a kid fail at a small task, and when to hand them a new roll of tape before they get so frustrated they quit. Understanding that a project that doesn’t match the sample still counts as learning, if the kid built it themselves.
One of my own 7th graders, Mia, who has ADHD and gets at least one detention a month for wandering during lectures, showed up with her dad that afternoon and stayed three hours to help. She walked nervous younger kids through using the safety saw at the nearby woodworking station, and on the way out told me it was the first time any adult had let her be the person who knew what she was doing. Most school days, she’s the kid who can’t sit still or follow written directions. At the fair, that ability to bounce between activities and connect with shy kids made her the best volunteer.
This year, Maker Faire Orlando put out the call for educators again last month, and they’re still short. They need 40 K-12 educators – classroom teachers, homeschool co-op leaders, special ed aides, art teachers, anyone who works with kids regularly – to cover activity booths, adapt projects for neurodivergent and disabled kids, and connect what kids make at the fair to school work. Shifts are only four hours, they cover your entry, and you can bring your own kids for free. I signed up for two, and passed the sign-up link around my school’s staff lounge. So far, 12 people across the whole district have signed up.
I get the hesitation. Most weeks I grade lab reports until 9 p.m. on Sundays, and the last thing I want on a weekend is to be “on” for hundreds of kids. But the lessons from the fair don’t only stay at the fair, for educators or parents. You don’t need a booth or convention center to give kids this kind of space at home. I keep a $12 plastic bin on my back porch for my own two kids, stocked with old broken remotes, dead batteries, masking tape, safety scissors, and a bulk pack of LEDs. I never give instructions or a required end product. If they get frustrated and say something isn’t working, I don’t fix it. I say, “Show me which parts you connected. What do you think would happen if you swapped them around?” That’s it. No fancy curriculum, no expensive tools.
Last week I got an email from Javi’s mom. He’s taken apart six old remotes since the fair, she said, and added LED lights to every stuffed animal on his bed. He worked up the courage to ask his teacher if he can bring his inventions to share during morning announcements next month. That didn’t happen because I’m a gifted solderer or engineering expert. It happened because I waited, didn’t push him to talk before he was ready, and didn’t hand him a paper telling him exactly what his project was supposed to look like. That’s the skill every educator already has, no special training required.
Tonight I have a stack of solar car lab reports to grade. Half the cars didn’t run the way the lab manual said they should, but a handful of kids drew full diagrams of their failed gear setups and wrote three sentences about why they think the wheels slipped. I’m giving those full credit. I don’t know if enough educators will sign up to fill all the open shifts before the fair next month. I don’t know if Javi will keep tinkering with remotes, or if Mia will ever stop getting detentions for wandering my classroom. But I already bought a bigger cooler to keep iced coffee cold through my shifts, and ordered three extra packs of wire strippers. No printed instruction sheets, this time. That’s enough for now.
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