Explore the space, talk to makers, participate in workshops… from your living room!

If there is something that characterizes the Maker Faire, it is to value the democratization of innovation and digital manufacturing. This year, due to the situation derived from Covid-19, the Maker Faire Galicia had to innovate even more to transform a physical event, through which more than 50,000 visitors have passed in the last 5 editions, to a 100% digital format that allow you to live the same experience but in a totally different way.

To achieve this ambitious goal, we were clear that the technological entry barrier for users should be zero or, at least, minimize it as much as possible and, in addition, we wanted to achieve a participatory interaction of the users of the fair. This is how we conceived this new Maker Faire Galicia platform. This platform, which is accessed completely free of charge through registration, works in a similar way to Google Street View.

Attendees will be able to circulate through the Gaiás Museum, contemplate the stands of the projects and also ask direct questions to the makers, participate in workshops or attend talks and round tables with references at national and international level, as already we have announced in previous post. For this interaction, users will need to have a Zoom account.

The platform concept is articulated through 3D photographs of the space, on which a series of graphic layers are generated with which users can interact. In a complementary way, we have developed a more conventional alternative navigation to make it fully accessible. Thus, the Maker Faire Galicia goes from being a fundamentally European-scale fair to being situated on a global scale, connecting makers, educators and organizations from all over the world.

The latest novelty is that this fair, unlike other years, will not be short-lived, since once the event is over, it will be possible to continue enjoying it throughout the year, with the content accessible on the platform and with the incorporation of new content from of the interests of the community.

If you have not yet registered on the platform, do not forget to do so in order to enjoy this very special edition that will take place from November 18 to 22, 2020.

Escornathon: design, print and program Escornabot

We already anticipate a large part of the activities that we are going to celebrate during the Maker Faire Galicia. And today we will tell you about a very special competition organized by the Aula Nova at CAFI Galicia (Autonomous Center for Training and Innovation). In this competition, which they call the Escornathon, the Escornabots will undergo a joint challenge run between the participants of the Maker Faire Galicia: the students, teachers and the maker community to form a traveling programming kit.

To participate in the Escornathon you must follow these steps:

1.Copy the basic piece of the Escornabot‘s analog programming.

2.Modify the piece by creating a “new programming” of the Escornabot.

3.Publish your modified piece on Tinkercad.

4.Print the piece in any color.

5.Fill out this participation form.

6.Make a postal shipment in an envelope to Aula Nova (CAFI Galicia) Rúa Lamas de Abade s / n 157002 Santiago de Compostela, do not forget to add your name behind the piece, the category in which you participate (student, teacher / ao maker) and a contact telephone number. You can participate with several pieces, all pieces must be sent before 11/20/2020.

Two very special makers will participate in this event: Pablo Rubio, maker from Zaragoza and trainer of Escornabot, and Xoan Sanpaíño, father of Escornabot and teacher trainer, who will share the limelight and functions.

In addition, participating in the Escornathon has a prize: an Escornabot assembly kit and maker material to continue developing projects. The winning pieces will be published on this website and there will be an award for the best design by the students, another for the best design by the teaching staff and a final award for the best design maker. This maker will assign his award to a Galician school and will act as a mentor, bringing his knowledge and help.

The complete information of the challenge can be found here. We are waiting for your piece, don’t miss it!

Startup Galicia experts in business creation, business models, technology, scalability or financing, will advise completely free of charge at the Maker Faire Galicia.

Startup Galicia is an open and collaborative community of entrepreneurs that promotes entrepreneurship in Galicia. They try to create connections between the entrepreneurs of the ecosystem and support its growth. One of the objectives they aim to achieve is to launch mentoring, training and project financing initiatives. And this is the reason for launching “Startup Galicia da man”, an initiative to mentor business projects that will be developed in the Maker Faire Galicia activities program.

Through this action, they want to help makers who have a business idea but do not know how to develop it, how to structure their business model or who want to create a company that is scalable. The initial approach is simple: they need you to tell them your idea and put it in the background, from there the Startup Galicia team will analyze what expert profiles you need and how they can guide you in the best way.

So if you want to participate in one of the mentoring that they will offer, do not think about it anymore and start by writing your idea, fill out the registration form and wait for them to contact you to set an appointment by video call, of about 40 minutes, in which they will guide you through the steps you need to take to turn your idea into a real project. What are you waiting for?

Join this hackathon that aims to create video games during the Maker Faire Galicia

Why Game Jam? This term comes from the words “game” and “jam” which refers to “jam sessions” or musical sessions that are mostly improvised. In Game Maker Jam the objective is the creation of video game prototypes in a free, novel and almost improvised way. The first Game Jam was held in 2002 by Chris Hecker and Sean Barrett as a game design and programming event to encourage experimentation and innovation in the video game industry.

The main theme of the Game Maker Jam will be discovered during the education day (20 November) at the table “Applications of technology in education”. From that moment the competition will begin and will end on November 22 at 2:00 p.m. A jury made up of professionals and academics related to the video game sector will assess the developments and that same day the winners will be announced during the Maker Faire Galicia awards ceremony.

This competition seeks to promote creativity and the development of video games, as well as to serve as a platform on which to meet people and establish relationships between the different participants. Therefore, the intellectual property of all the content created for each game will be owned by the members of each team.

Regarding the characteristics, the competition will have a 100% online format and any person or group can participate without restrictions of any kind, the only limitation is that the same person can only be part of one team and the teams can be a maximum of 3 people.

If you want to know the evaluation criteria, all the details about the competition or register to participate in it, you can find all the information on the website created for the activity.

Two days full of talks related to the world of innovation and technology applied to all areas.

The sessions open to all audiences of the sixth edition of the Maker Faire Galicia will take place on November 21 and 22. In addition to the activities and workshops, we will have a selection of the most innovative projects in the maker ecosystem, with which you can connect online and interact, and numerous super interesting talks.

These talks will begin on Saturday 21 in the afternoon with “Do It Yourself holograms” given by Asier Marzo (professor at the Public University of Navarra). Next will come Javi Serrano (co-organizer of the NeurotechX Chapter in Galicia) and Rocío Lozano (co-founder of the NeurotechX Chapter in Galicia) to talk about NeuroTech Galicia and how this community related to neurotechnology works.

After NeuroTechX Galicia we take a leap into the social sphere, where María Noguerol will talk about Cosiendo el paro, a social project directed by Manuela Carmena and herself, in which she pursues the social and labor integration of people in situations of exclusion or loss of freedom. Following in the wake of María, next we will have Noemi Barrientos (founder of León Startup) who will tell us about the interesting entrepreneurship program of the Roberto Rivas foundation, RR_dTerritorio, in which they propose the resolution of challenges through technology to undertake in the Galician rural.

We will close the day on Saturday with a table on Game Makers, where we will analyze the role of video games today and how they have evolved. This table will be moderated by Luz Castro (Founding Partner of imaxin | software) and formed by Manel Fernández (developer of graphic adventures at Akkad Estudios), Carla Bolaños (UX designer at Digital Monster Collective), Juan Gestal and Alfonso Iglesias (creators of Pixfans ).

The next day, Sunday 22, in the morning we will have an interactive table entitled “Bioheroes: The importance of communication and collaboration in Bioeconomy.” Beatriz Palomo (Head of the ASEBIO Projects and Health Area and Coordinator of the Spanish Biotechnology Platform) will be the moderator and will participate Beatriz Noya (USC), Marissa Bordallo (World Courier), Ángela Ruiz (Atipical), Bosco Emparanza (MOA foodtech) and María Iranzo (Complutense University of Madrid). In it they will delve into this topic and the relevance it has for the access of bioproducts to the market. Be one of the first 10 registered and receive a Bioproducts Kit.

In the afternoon we will have Maria Baqueiro Vidal (responsible for Sustainability of the SINSAL SON Estrella Galicia Festival) in the talk “La senda circular. culture and creativity for transformation”. After this talk on circular economy, we will now talk about low-cost solutions for independence in functional diversity with Thais Pousada García (doctor in the research group of technology applied to research in occupation, equality and health at the UDC).

The final table, whose name is Makers vs. Covid, will address precisely the issue of the action of the maker community in the face of the pandemic situation we are facing, from the state of alarm until now and what are the future prospects. This table will be made up of José Gago (co-founder of Cooperavirus), Álvaro Rey (CEO of Makergal), Iraisy Figueroa (Coordinator of the Coruña area in coronavirus makers) and César García (Creator of the maker hour, of the AIRE forum and co-founder of MakeSpace Madrid).

We will end the sixth edition of the Maker Faire Galicia with an awards ceremony for the projects most voted by the public that will receive an award by categories: minimaker (up to 16 years old), maker (over 16 years old) and scientific dissemination. In addition, the organization will deliver the now traditional Merit Maker, which recognizes every year the good work of a maker and the impact of their project on society.

Photo: Agencia SINC

We will have benchmark speakers, innovative activities and innovative projects carried out by the students

In the sixth edition of the Maker Faire Galicia we will have a day dedicated exclusively to education that will take place on Friday, November 20. After the opening table that will start the day, we will have the pleasure of listening to Maitane Alonso, the maker who surprised MIT and NASA. Maite will talk about how he has come to be a maker and the evolution of his project from the first prototype to the present.

Next, we will talk about the different realities of educational innovation, in which we will see the different aspects that innovation takes in different educational fields. For this we will have José Viñas (professor of Biology), Teo Manzano (Marketing Director and Product Development at Steelcase), María del Camino Pereiro (director of the Plurilingual CPI Virxe da Cela) and Paz Picallo (teacher at VermisLAB) will moderate. Then we will be able to enjoy the pitchs of the educational projects that will compete to win the award in this category.

At the next table “making education more inclusive” we will talk about a fundamental issue in the educational field such as inclusion. We will be able to see different examples and perspectives of inclusion thanks to the participation of Pablo Vilariño (Tiflotechnology and Braille Instructor at ONCE), Margarita Sebastián Herranz (Psychologist at Ceapat), Javier Mur (elementary school teacher) and we will have Felo Couto (special education teacher and ICT facilitator) as moderator.

The last table will deal with the application of technology in the education sector and in it we will analyze the role of new technologies and how we can apply them successfully. We will be accompanied by Carmen Fernandez Morante (dean of the Faculty of Education Sciences at USC), Conchy Fernandez (ICT advisor at the Autonomous Center for Training and Innovation, CAFI), Carmela Salguero (teacher at VermisLAB) and will be moderated by Luz Castro (Founding partner of imaxin|software).

Parallel to these presentations we will have an exhibition of projects related to the world of education, both from educational centers and from companies or other organizations. In addition, during this day there will be numerous workshops for all ages and the first Game Maker Jam will be officially launched!

Once the presentations are over, the awards will be given to the most outstanding projects of the day.

Entrepreneurship in the maker world, food, health, sustainability or reindustrialization will be some of the themes that will also have their space in the Maker Faire Galicia.

These days will begin on November 18 with an opening table in which the event will be presented and which will give way to the first presentation of the day, by Yannick Roy. The co-founder and CEO of NeuroTechX, the world’s largest neurotechnology community, will tell us how this project originated and how they have evolved to form a community of more than 16,000 neurotechnology enthusiasts.

We will continue during the morning with various round tables, the first of which will deal with technologies for the world 5.0, in which specialists in different areas will tell us how these technologies can change our day to day. For this we will have Marta Pita (Researcher at the QuTech Quantum Physics Laboratory at Delft University and Young Talent Award 2019), Federico Ruiz (Head of the National 5G Observatory of Spain), Vicente Moret (Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Information Technologies at the UDC) and José Antonio Galdón (President of Cogiti).

Next, we will talk about the role of accelerators in the maker ecosystem, a table where we can learn how a project can become a large company if it receives good support, as can be the case of accelerators. And we will close the morning with the table “From Maker to Startup” in which we will learn how some projects that went through the Maker Faire Galicia in past editions have managed to become truly successful Startups. At this table we will be joined by Marcos Souto (co-founder of 3D Limitless), Bruno Moya (creator of Glassear) and will be moderated by Jose Iglesias (Senior Community Director at Techstars).

We will resume the day in the afternoon with a topic of great interest and in which more and more innovative projects arise that change our habits and way of life. It is a table on the impact of new technologies on food and health. Related to this topic is the talk that Sofía Belenguer will give right after, who will tell us about “My real food, the app that revolutionized our food”. It is precisely a good example of how technology can change our eating habits.

This is followed by the first pitchs of the selected projects that will participate in the project competition. After the pitchs we will continue with a table dedicated to digitization in the food industry, a topic of great interest in which we will talk about the application of new technologies to food preservation, how digitization has radically transformed this sector or some example of opensource in the industry.

November 19 will be the last of the professional conferences and we will open it by talking about the challenges of reindustrialization, in which we will try to discover what the new industry will be like. Jennifer González Silva (technical secretary of the Galician Aeronautical Consortium), Lorena Riveiro (Communication & Marketing Director of Asime Galicia) and Bart Kamp (Coordinator of Internationalization Affairs of the Basque Institute of Competitiveness) will help us.

The second intervention of the day will be given by Antón Vázquez and his talk “Alén Space and the makers of space”. Antón will tell us about the evolution of Alén Space from that first project that began 12 years ago until it became a benchmark as it is today. After his intervention, he will give way to the pitchs of the remaining projects.

Then we will be able to enjoy the table “The technologies that will define the new industry” in which we will analyze the role of the implementation of different technologies from the perspective of different industrial fields. For this we will have Jan Puig (director of marketing and sales of PILZ Spain and Portugal), Senén Barro Ameneiro (Director of the CiTIUS-Singular Center for Research in Intelligent Technologies of the USC) and Fran Yáñez as moderator (plant manager at TI Fluid Systems).

At the last table of the morning “The democratization of airspace” we will talk about how this area should evolve with the introduction of new forms of navigation. Tomorrow’s session will close with James Bruton, the famous inventor and youtuber from the maker world, who will come to tell us about his open project Open Dog.

In the afternoon we will enter fully into sustainability issues with the table “Circular economy, smoke or reality?”, Accompanied by Miguel Varela (CEO of Teimas Desenvolvemento), Gumersindo Feijoo (professor of Chemical Engineering at USC) and Bea Noya (project manager at BioBridges) we will discover what is the reality of this new way of understanding economics. This table will be followed by Maitane Alonso, who will speak about the revolution in food preservation exemplified through his own project. Then we can see the final of the project competition.

The penultimate table will deal with the role of energy in the present and future of the planet, where we will talk about how this sector should evolve. We will be accompanied by Francisco Silva Castaño (Iberdrola Galicia delegate), Jacobo LLoret Casal (smart industrial solutions consultant) and Beatriz García (editor of the Economics and Labor section at La Voz de Galicia).

The last table will address the textile field in which we will try to answer the following question: Can textiles be circular? To help us we will have with us Lola Dopico (doctor in Fine Arts and professor at Uvigo) who will be the moderator, Idoia Cuesta (creator, trainer and textile researcher, specialized in basket weaving.), Maria Almazán (director of LATITUDE) and Arantza Vilas (founder, owner and creative director of Pinaki Studios).

The finishing touch to these conferences will be the awards ceremony for the 3 best projects presented in the professional category of this sixth edition of the Maker Faire Galicia. If you have been wanting to attend this great event, do not forget to register.

Augmented reality, robotics, quantum computing or e-textiles workshops and activities such as mentoring for startups or the first Game Maker Jam are some of the actions proposed for this maker week.

Professional Days (Wednesday 18 and Thursday 19 November)

Although there is still practically a month left for Maker Faire Galicia 2020, we can already begin to announce some of the most outstanding activities of this edition.

Bruno Moya, the maker that is democratizing the mixed reality sector with Glassear, will offer a workshop to learn how to create an augmented reality app in just 1 hour. Through the use of programs such as Unity 3D or Vuforia, Bruno will help us create an Augmented Reality mobile application, a preliminary step for the introduction to mixed reality.

Paola Guimeráns will teach us to apply new technologies in fashion, bringing us closer to a new concept that will promote a more intelligent and sustainable consumption in the sector. In this workshop you will learn about new materials, 3D printing and e-textiles, also known as electronic or smart textiles. This workshop will also be available at the education day.

The Startup Galicia community will be present again in this edition, but this time instead of the Open Space of previous editions, they will offer a mentorship for Startups. Hand in hand with experts from the community itself in business creation, business models, technology, scalability or financing, they will advise all makers interested in making a living from their project for free. More information on how to register here.

Education Day (Friday, November 20)

During the education day we will also have numerous workshops and activities, which will delight teachers and students of all ages, here are some of the most outstanding ones.

Vicente Moret-Bonillo will carry out a mathematical adventure workshop, in which different curiosities of mathematics will be explored from a pleasant and easy-to-understand perspective. He will also offer a workshop on the mystery of quantum mechanics, where he will talk about the tunnel effect, the wave-particle duality, the photoelectric effect, the Schroedinger’s cat, the Dirac prediction, the Heisenberg or Richard Feynman indeterminacy principle.

Ismael Rozas, Backend developer at IBM Research, will help us understand what quantum computing is in a simple way and for all audiences.

From VermisLAB they propose two very interesting workshops for teachers. The first of them is an introduction to computational logic, where we can learn through the development of projects with Micro: BIT, a programmable card widely used especially in the United Kingdom and that has great potential to develop STEAM activities in the classroom . The second one will be an introduction to robotics in a virtual environment with Mbot, thus allowing teachers not to depend on having the technology physically in the classroom to teach robotics.

Dani Sanz, from juegosrobotica.es, will bring us closer to Makecode Arcade and its educational potential, creating video games. In this workshop we will review the Makecode Arcade programming environment and how it can be used in education to create thematic applications.

Finally, from Maker Faire Galicia we want to give the creation and development of video games the prominence it deserves, and for this we are going to organize our first Game Maker Jam.

Open Days (Saturday 21 and Sunday 22 November)

Finally, in the open days, which will be held on November 21 and 22, we will also have a wide variety of workshops for all audiences, which, as in previous days, will be totally free.

Asier Marzo, collaborator of the television program El Hormiguero, will teach us how to build a simple ultrasonic levator formed by two opposing ultrasonic emitters. There will be two sessions of this workshop and you will need prior registration through our registration form.

From Tropa Verde they will bring us closer to the world of recycling and sustainability thanks to Inés Lusquiños, who will give a workshop to teach us how to create recycled paper at home.

VermisLAB will also be present at the open sessions, offering us introductory robotics workshops with Micro: BIT; introduction to basic video game development; rocket science and creation and finally creative electronics with conductive clay.

Most of the workshops can be accessed directly by registering on the new Maker Faire Galicia platform and will not require prior registration. Some workshops still have the schedules to be defined, in the coming weeks all the information about them will be available on the official platform of Maker Faire Galicia.

His passion and knowledge led him to create the open source robot Open Dog

A few years ago Boston Dynamics surprised everyone when it launched its famous dog-shaped robot, now, thanks to James Bruton, we can find a robot made with technologies from the maker world that, being open source, can be accessible to everyone.

Former toy designer, James Bruton is today a youtuber in the maker world and robotics in general. This passion for robotics has led him to create incredible open source projects that he shares with the whole world through his channel. Perhaps one of his best known projects is called Open Dog, an open source robotic dog that you can replicate in your own home.

This incredible electrical and mechanical engineer has taken do it yourself to another level with the creation of various projects such as the construction of various Star Wars droids, as well as several Marvel projects such as Iron Man and Hulkbuster among many others.

His adventure began in 2004, when he set out to build a life-size robot that could walk and could not find information on the internet, so he set out to do it himself and has not stopped ever since. At the Maker Faire Galicia he will talk about his journey and how he came to create his latest project: Open Dog.