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Over at CRAFT, Susan Beal whipped up these fantastic back to school mini chalkboards:

My daughter Pearl loves drawing with chalk, and when we were planning her second birthday party, I thought mini chalkboards would be the perfect toddler-friendly favor! My friend Ryan teamed up with me on the project and beautifully cut and prepared the wood for 25 mini-boards, and I did the painting and chalk-wrangling. The favors were a huge hit with the guests (including Ryan's daughter Gigi), and I've gotten to see them in heavy rotation with Pearl's buddies all summer!

This is a fun and easy project, perfect for making a few (or a few dozen) for your own kids, nieces, or nephews, or for a back to school, party, or birthday and holiday gifts.

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Gotham Books has generously given us three copies of Ken Denmead's wonderful Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share. We think this is a perfect giveaway for our MAKEcation theme.

To be eligible, all you have to do is tell us what geeky projects you're doing with your kids this summer, or what projects you'd like to do with them. Brownie points for sharing pics in the MAKE Flickr pool. It won't impact the drawing, but we might use them in a follow-up post here on the site.

The entry deadline is Wednesday, August 25, midnight PDT. Winners will be announced on Thursday morning. Good luck!

Geek Dad book site

More:

• Electronic origami from Geek Dad
• Best Slip n' Slide ever
• Make: Kids: An interview with GeekDad's Ken Denmead

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Ken Denmead, editor of the GeekDad blog, and author of the book Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share, posted one of our favorite projects from the book, Electronic Origami, on the Make: Projects platform. It's a starter origami project where you build a simple paper box with a built-in LED circuit, drawn with a conductive ink pen.

This would be a fun MAKEcation project to do with your kids. If you do any electronic origami, inspired by this, please tell us about it/link to photos in the comments below or in the project notes of Make: Projects.

The project started with the musical question:

How can we make origami even geekier?

I was browsing the aisles at my local electronics warehouse one day, looking at parts and pieces, and I noticed a very interesting item called a CircuitWriter pen. If you remember those glitter pens that everyone loved to use in junior high school, this is the same idea. But the material is actually silver, in a suspension of acetone, resin, and a few other chemicals with big names. The idea is that you can use it to draw basic electrical circuits or fix broken traces without having to etch or solder; the pen's ink works just like the thin conductive material on a circuit board, and will conduct electricity.

And that got me to thinking: what else could you draw on to make a circuit? What about paper? Could you draw a circuit on paper, and say, run an LED from a battery? And, if you could do that, what could you then do with the paper? All of which led me to this project.

Electronic origami on Make: Projects

Geek Dad book site

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My friend Paul Marlier has a pretty fun gig at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. His job as a workshop specialist is to come up with new ways to teach science to children (and their parents!). Recently, he took a few minutes to explain his latest prototype, which is a set of wooden blocks with electronics on them that museum visitors can connect up in any way they like. The idea is that they can learn by trying out different things to see what happens. The blocks themselves are nothing more than squares of plywood with different components stuck to them, and finishing nails for binding posts that can be connected to using alligator clips. To run the activity, he sets them out on the table without instructions, and participants are invited to hook things up and see what happens.

Paul explained that he chose this simple design over commercial products because he wanted to emphasize that these are just parts that anyone could find and put together. So far, the blocks have met with great success, with some interesting results. His favorite moment of discovery was when an inquisitive child hooked a motor up to a battery, through a speaker- the result was an amplified version of the noise that the motor makes when running!

He's certainly not the first person to construct a setup like this, however I like the homebrew way in which it is made. I'm also a huge fan of the radically different switches that all do basically the same thing.

Have you ever built something similar? Have any tips for how to improve the design, or suggestions for cool components to include? There are more photos of the setup in my Flickr stream.

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