The Maker Faire Rochester crew will be back at The Great New York State Fair in Syracuse on Saturday, August 25th and Sunday, August 26th. You’ll be able to find us in the S.T.E.A.M. Exhibit in the Science & Industry building.

At last year’s event, we brought our Big Face Boxes. This year, we’ll be bringing the Light Painting Photo Booth. Attendees will get to paint using lightsabers, LEDs, flashlights, and a few other fun light up projects we’re working on.

Judging from the layout, we’ll be joined by other awesome maker friends of ours including the Rochester Lego User Group, FIRST Team 1511 Rolling Thunder, and CNY Drones!

We’re personally pumped to see the new nightly Drone Light Show going on every night at the fair. Be sure to drop on by and say hi!

The Call for Makers is now officially open for this year’s Maker Faire Rochester. This year’s faire will be taking place on Friday, November 16th & Saturday, November 17th, 2018 at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center, so save the date!

Now that we’re a featured faire and a two-day event, you can apply to be a Maker on our Friday Student STEAM Fest, Saturday at the Maker Faire, or for both days. As a heads up, we will be accepting makers for both days on a rolling basis, and the individual days in batches. This will hopefully make mapping easier so makers who attend both days don’t have to move their booths.

The Student STEAM Fest will be a sneak preview for students in 3rd through 8th grade. The day will run from 9:00 am – 2:30 pm. We do encourage makers to have hands-on activities or demos to show the attending students. To keep all activities accessible to all students, we will not be allowing any sales on this day. However, commercial makers that attend the Friday Student STEAM Fest to provide demonstrations and/or free hands-on activities for students will be eligible for a discount on Saturday’s Commercial Maker fee.

We hope to have load-in for the Student STEAM day take place on Thursday night and Friday morning (we’re still working out the final details). Load in for Saturday should be the same as previous years.

The call for makers can be found at: http://rochester.makerfaire.com/call-for-makers/

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at rochesterfaireinfo@gmail.com.

Mini No More!

That’s right, we’re no longer a Mini Maker Faire, but a full-fledged Featured Maker Faire! Maker Faire Rochester is coming back bigger and better than ever on Friday & Saturday, November 16th & 17th, 2018.

This year, we’re adding a Student S.T.E.A.M. Fest on the Friday leading into the faire. The Student S.T.E.A.M. Fest will give hundreds of students in 3rd through 8th grade a hands-on sneak preview of Saturday’s event.

We will also be hosting a regional summit on the Friday afternoon, and a reception for makers and sponsors that evening. More information on our afternoon and evening events will be published soon.

Our Call for Makers opens on Wednesday, May 16th, so stay tuned for our announcement! We’re excited about what this year will bring.

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Upcoming Events:

To kick off our new name, we will be at 2 events this Saturday with our light painting photobooth. Be sure to stop by, say hi, and try out our booth.

We would also like to wish everyone an early Happy Mother’s Day! Our moms were some of our first maker inspirations and we would like to thank them for always supporting us.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about how to become a maker or anything about this year’s faire.
Keep on Making,
The Maker Faire Rochester Committee
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rochester.makerfaire.com
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If you can’t wait until November for the next Rochester Mini Maker Faire, we recommend checking out our friends at these regional Maker events! Most of them are still accepting makers too.

FLX Maker Fest in Phelps – April 14th
Twin Tiers Mini Maker Faire – April 14th
Mario the Maker Magician at Strong Museum – April 21st & 22nd
Mohawk Valley Mini Maker Faire – April 21st
Twin Tiers Maker Expo – April 21st
Imagine RIT – April 28th
Buffalo Mini Maker Faire – May 12th

We’ll be active this spring with hands-on activities, including our big face boxes, cardboard couches, and a new light painting photo booth that we’ve been working on. You can find us at not only some of the above events but all over Rochester:

Rochester Science Expo – April 14th
Fast Forward Film Festival Gala – April 14th
RMSC After Dark: Space Ball – May 12th

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about how to become a maker or anything about this year’s faire.

3,600 Attendees, 125+ Makers, and Tons of Making

Thank you all for being part of the 4th Annual Rochester Mini Maker Faire! Saturday was an was a tremendous success, far more than we could have imagined! We are beyond thrilled that everyone could make it out – all 3,600 of you (a new record for us)!

We had over 125 makers and more than half of them provided hands-on activities. We had over 80 volunteers, and we could not have done this without your help. Our generous, wonderful sponsors help make this huge event happen. A special thank you to our parent organization, NYSCATE, for continuing to support us and encouraging us to think big.

We would also like to thank Dhanya Asher for creating the above video from the faire, and our photographer, Derrick Stanton, whose photos we can’t wait to share with everyone soon.

We want your feedback!

While we are still recovering, we have heavily enjoyed all the feedback, photos, and compliments you have shared with us. If you can spare a minute, we’d appreciate you filling out this short, anonymous survey, in order for us to improve next year’s event: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RochesterMMF2017_attendee.

Thank our Sponsors

Be sure to thank all of our sponsors for supporting the faire. We could not hold the event without all of their continuous support. Our sponsors include:
Make, Rochester Institute of Technology, WXXI Kids, Wegmans, Heslin Rothenberg Farley & Mesiti, The RIT Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity (MAGIC), home of the Empire State Development-designated Upstate Region Interactive Technologies Hub and partner organization ROC Game Dev, Rochester Broadway Theatre League, EMA Design Automation, the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Makeway, Roc City Laser, Yelp, Mayday! Underground, MyDarndest, Greater Rochester Teen Book Festival, the Rochester Makerspace, and High Tech Rochester.

Keep in Touch!

If you have any photos from the faire, feel free to share them with us! We have already started to post our photos up on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We’ll probably have all of our photos posted within the next few days. If all goes as planned, we should also have a special video with footage from the event. You can find us at:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RochesterMiniMakerFaire
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rochmakerfaire
Instagram: https://instagram.com/rochesterminimakerfaire/

Rochester, are you ready for a 30 foot long, 19 foot tall, fire breathing dragon?? Heavy Meta joins us this year at Rochester Riverside Convention Center on November 18th!

A beautiful, terrifying beast, Heavy Meta shoots huge fireballs from its tail and animatronic mouth!

Get your tickets in advance and don’t miss this amazing beast!
https://rochester.makerfaire.com/

Our Call for Makers is still open for the 4th Annual Rochester Mini Maker Faire! We’re hoping to beat our record of 130 makers that we set last year.

Some of the projects that we had last year included:

Arc + Flame Welding Simulator
A test of strength to win some fire with Hell Blazer, The Flaming Carnival Game
Learning to solder your first electronics project
Screen printing your own Rochester Mini Maker Faire poster to take home
Tearing apart old electronics and see how they worked
Wearing a 3D printed prosthetic with e-NABLE
Animating your first stop-motion film
Piloting a drone
Being inspired by kid Makers, including the Rosie’s Robots, a 9 year old roboticist
Playing video and board games developed right here in Rochester
Marveling at a theme park built with K’nex
Creating useful items out of old cassette tapes
Hearing live music from the Rochester Recorder Society
Mixing the future with the past with the Rochester Steampunk Society and the Enchanted City Steampunk Festival from Troy
Picking a lock with The Open Organization Of Lockpickers
Driving robots with local FIRST Robotics teams
Making and learning with makerspaces from around Rochester and beyond
Preparing for the wilderness by learning outdoor survival skills
Launching rockets through recreational plumbing
Fixing bikes
Lighting up with holographic projections and infinity mirrors in our dark room
Discovering a monthly electronic kit developed in Buffalo

Fire projects are allowed again this year and are highly encouraged! We will also be bringing back the Dark Room, along with a few new special areas.

We’re accepting applications through October 23rd and then through before the faire on a maker by maker basis.

Apply today at https://rochester.makerfaire.com/call-for-makers/.

We had an exhibit at the New York State Faire over labor Day Weekend as part of the inaugural S.T.E.A.M. Exhibit! Thousands of attendees stopped by our booth and tried on our Big Face Boxes for the first time!

We’ve had a close relationship to the Buffalo Mini Maker Faire as they were our inspiration to start the Rochester Mini Maker Faire. Attending their faire is always a treat as we love chatting with their producers and seeing the mix of Buffalo, Rochester, and Western New York makers all gathering together.

While in Austin for a work conference, we were able to stay with one of the Maker Faire Austin producers and help out during their faire! Below are a few highlights from their faire.