September 6, 2025September 8, 2025 by shannonchance

Feel the spirit! STEM Ensemble at Dublin Maker 2025

Most years, right before the beginning of the new academic year, I have the chance to be part of Dublin Maker. It’s a festival that celebrates the creative flair of people from all around Ireland. I’ve been attending Dublin Maker since 2015 and it never fails to delight.

The 2025 edition of Dublin Maker happened last weekend at Leopardstown Racecourse, on the south side of Dublin.

David Powell explaining how the radio features work. It’s designed to facilitate continual upgrade and ongoing R&D.

The open, participatory nature of Dublin Maker really appeals to me. As an education researcher, I’m all about the social construction of new knowledge and Dublin Maker epitomizes this phenomenon!

The venue was packed this year, as usual, and I think we’ve benefited from the rain outside. I attended Saturday (of the two-day event) and observed thousands of visitors engaged in hands-on technology, arts, craft, engineering, and science learning.

The exhibition halls buzzed as makers of all ages shared their projects, demonstrated new ideas, and connected with other creative enthusiasts. Exhibitors showcased everything from polished inventions to prototypes and works in progress.

Postdoc Patricia (Patri) Lucha Farina, Assistant Lecturer Mayank Parmar, and Senior Researcher Harish Kambampati working together.

Heaven knows my colleagues always work to the very last minute, creating new aspects of their projects (even though they’ve all been enthusiastically working for months to prepare)! I’ve provided photographic evidence of our July meeting below. ⬇️

STEM Ensemble’s July meeting to prepare for Dublin Maker.

This year was no exception as our makers worked to perfect the biomedical engineering projects they’d brought to share. Several of our group’s new lecturers and researchers worked together on this table.

Our researchers, Mayank Parmar and Dr. Harish Kambampati, demonstrating biomedical technologies.

I typically help with communicating the ideas to a younger audience or contributing something that’s more on the artistic or spatial side (since I’m an architect, who loves to hang out with these creative engineering types).

In the early years of Dublin Maker, 2015-2018, you would’ve seen us under the banner of RoboSlam. Our booth usually has several tables of displays with hands-on activities, grouped together under some sort of theme.

One year, we hosted the “RoboSlam Cafe” where attendees could build their own robots from low-cost kits—we wanted to provide firsthand experience in robotics. We like to demystify how everyday “smart” devices are made by showing people what’s “under the hood” and making it understandable.

Two of my personal favorites among our past exhibits have been “fractleismus” (generating images from attendees’ sketches using a fractal algorithm) and the “vaporwave fotobooth”, both presenting creations by Ted Burke. ⬇️

The fortune teller and subsequent Talking Head booth developed by Shane Ormonde, which integrated AI, were also quite intriguing. The second of these demonstrated generative AI work in real time, back in chat, GPT was just emerging. ⬇️

Shane Ormonde’s fortune teller from 2019.

This year, our major theme was the “Spirit of Radio”.

My STEM Ensemble colleagues have been working hard to develop a radio that has analog feature features as well as AI enabled digital features. This is related to a project that Paula Kelly is leading to introduce senior citizens to AI and help them understand the technology.

David Powell with our new (left) and antique (right) radios.

The radios that we displayed this year were predominantly developed by David Powell, Keith Colton, Frank Duignan, Shane Ormonde, Ted Burke, Richard Hayes. Of course, many other people provided ideas and advice during our STEM Ensemble meetings.

I’ve been attending the meetings, although I can’t contribute much on this topic. Nevertheless, I go to learn and soak in the maker spirit!

Some of the STEM Ensemble at Dublin Maker, giving me a good laugh!

Since we’re no longer just about robotics, we shifted our name from RoboSlam to “Dublin STEM Ensemble”. Our group is associated within the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Technological University Dublin. It’s also associated with the university’s tPOT research group (“tPOT” stands for “toward people oriented technology”), to which I belong.

STEM Ensemble is group of staff, students, and alumni who reflect TU Dublin’s long-standing commitment to inspiring public interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Damon Berry holds tPOT and the STEM Ensemble together—he’s a great leader!

By engaging directly with attendees, our group encouraged new perspectives and fostered a spirit of creative inquiry.

We are hoping see you at Dublin Maker next year!

September 15, 2023September 25, 2023 by shannonchance

End-of-summer memories–too good to let go

I’m sitting down to write about academic affairs… but first I’m dying to revisit a few choice memories from the summer. After I returned from the trip to Virginia (Virginia Tech) and Maryland (for the ASEE conference), I spent several weeks working intensely on curriculum design. Then, I jetted off to Corfu for a tranquil and relaxing holiday with Aongus. After he departed, my colleague Svetlana joined the trip for a bit. A few pictorial highlights are shared below:

I returned from Greece just in time for Dublin Maker 2023 (an extensive fair and expo of creative people in action) before commencing the new academic year at TU Dublin.

Our TU Dublin group, which has grown from RoboSlam into the Dublin STEM Ensemble in recent years, hosted four tables worth of activities at Dublin Maker, including robot activities, button making, an AI-fed talking head, a facial recognition setup, and Ted Burke’s super fun FrankenFont activity that I helped facilitate.

Visitors to our FrankenFont area helped create a brand new type font, with 65 individuals creating letters for our set by the end of the day.

March 5, 2020March 6, 2020 by shannonchance

Dublin Maker here we come!

The TU Dublin RoboSlam gang is alive and kicking!

Nearly 20 of us met in February to start planning our exhibition for Dublin Maker 2020. The big event is to be held on the 27th of June in Herbert Park, on the south-side of Dublin.

Last week, a portion of our team reassembled to get different people’s parts working together in a coordinated way. I’ve created a little video of that second prep session for you to enjoy.

One thing that worries me, though, is that all the stuff my colleagues have made looks so very cool, so incredibly professional, that visitors to our Dublin Maker booth will think they BOUGHT this ready-made. Not so.

For instance, Keith Colton (in the video with the bandaid on his thumb) used a 3D printer to make the car he’s holding. He made it from scratch.

Shane Ormond combined a whole bunch of cutting-edge technologies to get a tiny camera on top of his race car to feed video into the VR headsets and TV monitors, all the while controlling the car’s behavior from a hand-held device. He’s been sending us video updates from his house and it’s been cool to watch his car speed under sofas and chairs and around his lovely home.

When I tired driving, I couldn’t control the car too well–and I’m pretty used to driving sporty cars! In this case, the car didn’t quite have the handling of my 2004 Nissan Z350. The car was racing around at top speed and the VR googles made it all seem much too real!

Note in he video how Paul Leamy’s stomach turned when his car flipped over. Seemed real! You can see on the TV monitor, but viewed through VR goggles it’s all the more gripping.

So, see for yourself!

Come on out on June 27th to see where all this leads. Our team is just at the start and we plan to build a plethora of buses, stop lights, trams, and Dublin city sites for our cars to whizz though on Dublin Maker day 2020.

July 28, 2014July 28, 2014 by shannonchance

Making Videos, Making Fairs

Producing robot-building events requires warp-speed learning. In just the past few days, helping with a Dublin Maker event, I learned:

to quickly make and post educational videos
to setup and run a RoboSlam educational booth
how to teach teenty-tiny tots to build robots
what “Makers” are, what they do, and how they talk (it’s a whole new language to me!)
about 3-D printing and how to build (and even invent) your own machines using laser cutters and 3-D printers

I’ve posted links to two videos I made as well as some photos from last Saturday’s Dublin Maker event.

Here’s the edited video we posted to introduce RoboSlam.com to website visitors. I am really quite proud of it!

Here’s the short promo video we posted earlier last week to advertise the fair:

I wish I could convey the excitement of seeing little four and six year old girls build their first robots… and tiny little boys jump up and down with glee as they discover the difference between remote-controlled and autonomous robots!

Although I captured some behind-the-scenes images of set up and take down with my still cameras (posted below) they don’t come anywhere close to showing what it was like to be there. Fortunately, I was able to capture some video of the kids building and operating robots so we can learn from it and create even better programs in the future!