#MFR2023: Learning in Maker Learn

This years Maker Faire Rome was kicked off at Gazometro Ostiense on Thursday evening with the Opening Conference targeted towards “Innovators Like Us”.

Attendees were invited to hear from some very prominent speakers at the event, which included Ken Endo a prosthetic engineer at Sony CSL, Mattia Barbarosa known as the world’s youngest space entrepreneur, founder of Sidereus Space Dynamics, Sabrina Bassetto a research engineer in Spindox who works in AI and we had a very impressive demonstration from Hiroshi Ishiguro who has created an android humanoid robot and was showing its capabilities to the crowd.

The location itself is a striking, cylindrical iron structure built in the 1930s, which is now famed for hosting festivals & art exhibits.  We were given a great treat to meet these speakers on the first evening at such a creative spot!

I arrived yesterday morning at Fiera di Roma for the first day of this massive event, champing at the bit to get in and meet some of these amazing innovators.  This has rapidly become one of my favourite events of the year and I wasn’t disappointed!

This annual event is stretched out into various pavilions and after sharing this article earlier this month about Maker Learn, I knew I wanted to visit this room first. I was not disappointed with what I saw though.

Making Agro-Waste Wearable as a Cellulose Fabric

 The first place I stopped at was a stand with bacteria in it!  Intrigued, I approached the stand and was met by Arianna Patruno, a student from Luigi Einaudi Canosa di Puglia (BT).

From L-R Arianna, Laura , Annamaria Divicarro

She explained that her class and especially her teacher, had created a way to use cellulose and created it into a fibrous strand that can be made over time, into a type of material. They came up with this idea in class after a discussion about how to improve fashion and clothing quality, to naturally reduce waste and of course, be more sustainable.  They needed to ensure that it was also free from toxins and hypoallergenic.

Their goal was to make a product of sustenance that would meet all of this criteria and still be less impactful on the environment than the current “fast fashion” that we so often see today. The mindset of the team is to use waste from the agro-food industry.  The team have created a process that uses acetic bacteria capable of producing cellulose.

A jar of cellulose extract and the stand at Maker Learn, Maker Faire Rome

They are collaborating with a team at CNR-NANOTEC of Bari and they provide resources like a PCR machine.  The students have learned how to isolate the correct bacteria, on growing and identifying substrates to cultivating and optimizing bacterial metabolism, from end to end.

So much food is wasted these days, utilizing a simple technique in this midscale chemistry could result in transforming the fashion sector completely.  So from small seeds like these innovative students and their impressive teacher, I hope one day you will see a shift in sustainability tactics for this very profitable sector.

Monitoring Environmental Impacts on Bodies of Water

Educating our next generation to understand current and future impact on our ecosystem is an important thing to do and speaking with Irene Tarantino today made me realise there are many ways we can instil this in our children.

It’s just a fact that it is so much easier these days to make science more interactive and frankly students have come to expect this.  I was watching this young man actively engaged, checking specimens on a microscope on this very busy stand and it made me stop in my tracks.

Irene explained that this project she is a part of is called The LAGOrà project (link is in Italian but you get the gist) and its aims are to make girls and boys passionate about science and technology by focusing on local issues, namely Lake Massaciuccoli.  It’s ideally situated near the school and now performs as an “open-air laboratory”.  Here the students monitor the lake’s health.

This empowering activity helps the students become active protagonists in the experimentation.  The hope is, is it helps relinquish the typical anxiety that some young children feel about current issues such as climate change.

All experimental activities take place either at the lake, the school laboratories or / and at the new teaching laboratory of the Environmental Sciences Degree Course of the University of Pisa which is located right on the lake and which made it possible to carry out all previous orientation activities.

What I have come to understand from reading about this class – is not only are the students monitoring everything but they’re also creating tools (like control units for detecting air pollutants and more!) and are of course working on the solutions. One noted solution is educating the general citizen through environmental remediation campaigns and improving awareness of the situation.

As you can see its quite a multidisciplinary relationship and it’s definitely appeared to have been coordinated very effectively thus far.  I’m not sure how many communities and universities could replicate this so well, but it certainly give us a understanding of how it ought to happen.

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Experience Labs

These labs are rooms where attendees can get some direct knowledge from the tutor in one field or another.  These can be fairly intensive and are normally hugely interactive as well.  I stopped and hovered at a couple on the first day.

The first was called Earth in a Bubble and it was being run by ESA (European Space Agency.  It had the students breaking out into groups, creating feedback and generally feeling very invested in what was happening.

The second was equally as dynamic but this time the attendees were talking about Physics.  My favourite exercise that I saw the tutor do, was he broke the attendees into 5 groups and they each had to pretend they had an experiment they wanted to pitch to the other groups.  Each group would be a country that had a certain budget and they had to try and convince the other countries how important their experiment was.  That was the only instruction.

I asked why he did this and the tutor Lorenzo Thomas Contessa said that it gave the students a real taste for what scientists go through to convince their peers, their universities and funders on how to get their work paid for and pushed out.  The students instinctively, vie, cajole and “promise” their experiment is the most meaningful.  He said it was interesting to see this was innate in all attendees, no matter what age. It was an amusing and interesting session and well worth doing as a “research simulator”.

They also create these kits that they issue out to schools and communities.  It’s got everything you need to enable the young person to truly understand what physics is and how it can be applied.

I will be adding more blogs about my 3 day trip to Maker Faire Rome, so please come back soon for further updates.

About Melanie Boylan

Melanie has been a Freelance Journalist on the Irish Tech News senior team since November 2016.  Her background knowledge in Space, Science, Sustainability, Climate Change, STE(A)M, StartUps/ScaleUps and Social Media has allowed for some great chats with some amazing podcast guests.

Melanie also is a Social Media Trainer, Digital Marketer, Mentor, Speaker and separately Co-Founder of STOMP Social Media Training Ltd and The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast and Brand Ambassador for AgoraPulse UK and Ireland.  Melanie is the winner of the Social Media Training Provider of the Year 2022/2023 with the Republic of Ireland Prestige Awards.

If you would like to learn more, please visit her LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanieboylan/