The Fraternal Order Of Lockpicking Sports (FOOLS) will be back with the lock picking challenge. Race to be the first one to open the lock. They will also have various locks to check out and picks for sale. Come test your hand at opening some locks.

Bloominglabs is Indiana’s first makerspace and are one of the hosts of Makevention. We will have all sorts of crazy stuff there. The laser cutter will make an appearance. Make sure to stop by our booth on the second floor and get a laser cut Makevention badge and check out the badges from past years. Outside, the homemade recumbent bike will be there and one of our members is bringing a quad-copter. And hopefully the twinkie cannon will make an appearance. Crazy and chaotic as always, Bloominglabs will be there in full force!

Greetings and well met!
We present Bloomington, Indiana’s Society for Creative Anachronism, called Mynydd Seren.

The Society for Creative Anachronism, or SCA, is an international organization dedicated to researching and re-creating the arts, skills, and traditions of pre-17th-century Europe.

Members of the SCA study and take part in a variety of activities, including combat, archery, equestrian activities, costuming, cooking, metalwork, woodworking, music, dance, calligraphy, fiber arts, and much more. If it was done in the Middle Ages or Renaissance, odds are you’ll find someone in the SCA interested in recreating it.

Below are pictures from our local group. They even have a ballista! Woo!

WonderLab Museum of Science, Health, and Technology will be back for the third year. This year they will be re-purposing plastic cups and compact discs as building materials for participants to build their own walls, towers, sculptures or whatever their imagination can come up with.

Press Puzzles will present the Art of Making Puzzles by showing off their hand crafted wooden jigsaw puzzles made using a scroll saw. They will also be demonstrating using a jigsaw to make several three dimensional mechanical puzzles.

The Jerry Slocum Collection of mechanical puzzles embodies a lifetime pursuit of the intriguing and the perplexing. The result is the largest assemblage of its kind in the world, with over 32,000 puzzles and 4,000 puzzle related books. The puzzles in the collection range from Victorian era amusements to cutting edge designs by modern designers who use laser cutters and three-dimensional printing to create their designs. Learn about the fourteen different types of puzzles and the different challenges each pose. Puzzles from our hands-on collection will be at the booth for attendees to solve. Hear about how puzzle designers develop their deviously difficult creations, and just maybe find a new idea for your next project.

Come check out an autonomous robot that will move around on a previously created 2D map. Either points can be setup in advance for the robot to move to, or points can be given to it in real time. The robot finds a path to get to the point. If something gets in it’s way it finds another path. If there is no path available, it will just sit there and wait for a path to open up, or wait for a new point to go to. Also, to some extent, the robot can recover when it’s wheels spin in place. The functioning robot is shown in this youtube video.

The IU Creativity Labs will be back for the 3rd year with their e-textile booth titled “Sew a little light into your life!” Come learn about the exciting new domain of e-textiles—electronics embedded into clothing and other soft articles. Then, learn how to use conductive thread to sew an LED light into a fabric bookmark! No prior experience with sewing or electronics needed.