Why Maker Faire Orlando’s Open Educator Role Matters for Kids Who Struggle in Traditional Classrooms
It was 4:17 p.m. on the last day of 2023 Maker Faire Orlando, and half the exhibitors were already rolling display carts toward the Orange County Convention Center loading docks, when I found 12-year-old Javi hunched over a folding table, knuckles white around a soldering iron. The college student volunteering at the community take-apart station had been trying to shut down for 17 minutes; he had a midterm review that night, and kept stacking wire cutters and spools of solder into a plastic bin. Javi wasn’t arguing or talking back, just leaning further over the cracked 1998 Game Boy circuit board he’d pulled from an e-waste bin that morning. I knew Javi from the after-school robotics club I help run at his west Orlando middle school; he has ADHD, gets sent to the office at least twice a month for wandering out of his seat, and 70% of his written classwork comes home with “missing assignment” stamped at the top.
I tapped the volunteer on the shoulder, told him I’d lock up the station, and he could head out. I sat down on the other end of the table and didn’t say anything for five minutes, until Javi mumbled that he was 10 minutes from done. He was modding the Game Boy for his 8-year-old brother Luka, who has cerebral palsy and can’t press the system’s tiny original buttons. He’d soldered larger, raised arcade buttons to the circuit board, sanded down the plastic casing to make them fit, and only had to connect the last wire for the power. I handed him a fresh paper towel when he burned his thumb on the iron, didn’t tell him to be more careful. Twelve minutes later, he slid the power switch, and the familiar Nintendo chime sounded. Luka, who’d been sitting in a stroller off to the side with their mom for two hours, leaned over, pressed the big start button with his whole palm, and Mario popped up on the screen.
“He never finishes anything at school,” his mom Marisol said, wiping churro crumbs off Luka’s shirt. “His teachers say he has no follow-through. He didn’t even stop for the churro he begged for on the way in. Six hours straight, no break.”
Three weeks ago, I sat around a scuffed folding table in a cinder block warehouse off John Young Parkway, where we store Maker Faire supplies between events, sorting through 47 applications for the organization’s first ever full-time dedicated educator role. For 11 years, all our youth programming has been run by volunteers: retired engineers, high school robotics coaches, me, squeezing work in between full-time jobs and family bedtimes. Last year, 12,000 kids came through the gates, 3,000 of them on school field trips. We kept running into the same gap: the makers who run stations know everything about 3D printing or drone building or upcycled fashion, but most don’t know anything about IEPs, sensory overload, state testing benchmarks, or why a kid might shut down instead of saying they’re confused when you rush them. That’s why we’re finally hiring for this role, and why it matters far beyond one weekend in November.
A month after last year’s faire, we got an email from a 4th grade teacher named Rita who works at a Title I elementary in Pine Hills. She brought 28 kids on a field trip, and one of her quietest students – a girl who rarely spoke in class and struggled with every writing assignment – built a solar-powered bird feeder out of a discarded milk jug, a broken path light, and hot glue, and won a blue ribbon in the kid maker category. Rita wanted to run monthly maker projects in her classroom, but her principal told her she had to tie every activity to required reading and math standards to get time off the regular schedule, and she couldn’t cover supplies on her $180 annual classroom budget. She ran two projects out of pocket, then emailed a few months later to say she’d had to stop.
A lot of parents I talk to assume maker learning is something you do if you have extra money, a fancy playroom, or a kid who’s already “good at STEM.” That’s not what we see at the faire. What kids get out of messing with broken parts and half-baked projects isn’t just skill with a screwdriver. It’s the chance to set their own pace, fix their own mistakes, and make something that matters to someone they love, without a rubric dictating exactly what the final product has to look like. The problem is, most adults – even well-meaning volunteers and parents – default to the same rules we use in classrooms: stay on schedule, follow the steps, finish on time, clean up right now.
I’ve tested small, low-cost adjustments at home with my own 10-year-old and with robotics club that don’t require rearranging whole schedules or budgets. If your kid is deep in a build when you have to leave for soccer practice or dinner, don’t tell them to throw it all away right now. Keep a designated plastic bin or shelf for half-finished projects, and say, “We have to leave in 10 minutes. Let’s set this whole thing on the shelf exactly as it is, and you can pick right back up when we get home.” Most meltdowns at the take-apart table don’t happen because a kid can’t handle leaving – they happen because they think all their work is going to get tossed before they’re done. For adults leading activities, skip the constant “be careful” reminders; if a kid burns a finger or a wire comes loose, hand them a band-aid or a new spool and ask what they want to try next, instead of stepping in to fix it for them. You don’t need a $600 3D printer for this at home, either. A $10 precision screwdriver set from the dollar store, a magnet mat to corral tiny screws, and a bin of broken remotes, old hairdryers, and cracked phone cases you were going to throw away works just as well for most elementary and middle school kids.
The new educator won’t just be running craft stations on faire weekend. Their whole job is to bridge that gap between the convention center floor and regular classrooms and living rooms. They’ll write free, standards-aligned pre-faire activities for teachers like Rita, so they can justify field trips and request supply donations from local hardware stores. They’ll run monthly free maker meetups at public libraries across Orange, Seminole, and Osceola counties, so kids don’t only get this experience one weekend a year. They’ll train every volunteer who works the kid zones on simple shifts: visual step cards for kids who can’t process long verbal instructions, a quiet sensory corner for kids overwhelmed by crowd noise, a “project hold” shelf for half-finished builds so no one has to rush out the door with their work incomplete.
Last week we did a second interview with a woman named Clara, a former special ed para who left Seminole County Public Schools last year after the district cut most of its hands-on programming. She showed up with a beat-up binder full of systems she built for her old classroom: take-apart bins she assembled for $17 each from Goodwill electronics, visual cue cards for nonverbal kids, a “project graveyard” shelf where kids could leave broken builds for up to a month to come back to whenever they had free time. She told us about a 5th grader who spent three weeks building a custom pencil grip for a classmate with juvenile arthritis, who broke the whole thing the day before he planned to give it to her. A year earlier, he would have screamed and thrown the whole thing in the trash, she said. But because he knew he could walk away and come back, he took it apart, saved the usable parts, and built a new one in two days.
That’s the thing most traditional grading and scheduling doesn’t account for. Learning doesn’t run on 45-minute class periods or nine-week grading windows. Sometimes you need six hours straight to finish a modded Game Boy for your brother. Sometimes you need three weeks and two failed tries to get a pencil grip right. We don’t ask kids to explain that on end-of-year tests, but it’s the stuff that sticks with them long after they forget the vocabulary words they memorized for a quiz. For teachers who want to work this into their classrooms without fighting admin, I always suggest starting tiny: pick one standard you already have to teach that month, and let kids demonstrate mastery any way they want, instead of requiring a worksheet. They can build a small demo, record a 30-second voice note, draw a comic strip, whatever. You only grade them on whether they understand the core concept – you don’t have to grade every drop of hot glue or misplaced screw. Most of the time, it takes 10 minutes less grading than a stack of identical worksheets.
We haven’t offered Clara the job yet. We have two more candidates to interview next week, and we’re still sorting out funding for the library meetups, which depends on a grant we won’t hear about until October. Javi already signed up to volunteer at the kids’ LED pin station at this year’s faire in November. His mom says he still gets in trouble for wandering out of his seat during math, and most of his homework still gets turned in half done. But he shows up to the pop-up maker days we run at the downtown library every month, and spends the whole time teaching 7- and 8-year-olds how to strip wire and light up small bulbs. Last month, he turned in a full science fair project on conductive thread, something he worked on at the library after school. He got a B+. It wasn’t an A, and he still doesn’t raise his hand much in class. But he finished it. That’s enough for now.
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