Maker Faire- Day 1

Last weekend, Matt had a great idea of taking us all down to the Maker Faire in Kansas City. We took the camper down there, camped at Worlds of Fun (but never went to the park) and spent two days at the Maker Faire, which was held at Union Station. I wanted to share some pictures of the faire because I have been trying to explain it to many people! It really was just a faire of creativity and inventions and a lot of FUN!!

One of the first places we stopped at was the robot competition.  These robots were built by high-schoolers (team 1825 is a homeschooling group!) and they take them to competitions.  We asked a team how much it cost and it was $5000 just to enter the competition + another $3000 or so to build the robot!! Wow!

The point of the competition was for the robots to pick up the balls and throw them through the hoop.  You see towards the left hand side of the picture below that there is a wooden structure placed on the course. The robots needed to throw the ball through the top section of this wooden strcuture. And they did it!

 The instructors would come out and let the kids throw the balls at the robots! Christian loved it!

 

 

There were also robots there that were built by middle-schoolers, these were not as fun to watch, but still fascinating! 

 

Courtney and Megan thought the best part of the faire were the free twinkies they were giving out!! I really don't know what twinkies had to do with creativity!!

Another favorite part of my time at the faire was the race cars. Many of my pictures did not come out here, but see under the white tent, there were many race car teams under that tent.  They would take the old kid-battery powered cars and spend $500 to get them running. Then they would race them around this track! Hilarious! There were guys in their 30's driving little pink jeeps! I wish I had more pictures!  This was really fun to watch!

Another great part was the Coke and Menthos show! These two guys in white lab jackets set up 108 Coke One bottles and put in 540 menthos! They then turned on some music and had a show! Again, my pictures during the show did not come out, but I have some pre-show pictures.

Showing us some variation in spray.

 

 We then spent some time at Science City because that was free with our ticket to the Maker Faire.  By this time, I was done and was ready to head home. 

I can't forget this little story! As we were backing into a parking space at the beginning of the day, Matt said, "I'm not doing a very good job backing up," and then we heard a great big KABOOM!!! He had backed into a column in the parking garage and received this dent into the bumper of the truck!