What’s a girl gotta do to get some privacy around here? Enlist some help from Tested’s Adam Savage and littleBits of course!
Tia is like any other girl – she just wants some privacy. But unlike most other girls, Tia is currently a patient at the Stanford Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Program, with doctors and nurses coming in and out of her room throughout the day and night. While this is very helpful to Tia, a girl just wants her space sometimes!
In this episode of Tested, Adam Savage visits the SAYAC Pop-Up Innovation Center to collaborate with hospital staff members to invent a doorbell for Tia using littleBits. Through trial and error, Adam and his team figure out a way to create a doorbell that can communicate with Tia and whoever is asking to enter her room. And, most importantly, everyone had fun doing it!
Adam Savage featured the SAYAC’s first ever Pop-Up Innovation Center to celebrate their grand opening in the Maker Tour segment of his show. The center has two main objectives. The first is to help patients feel like part of a whole community of makers and inventors throughout the hospital, even though they often can’t leave their rooms. The second is to begin researching the impact of Maker Therapy and how it betters a patient’s quality of life.
This is a place where they can come, find problems to solve, solve them, and be part of the culture of innovation in the hospital itself.”
–Adam Savage
Makerspaces in hospitals are not totally new. Gokul Krishan wanted to found a hospital makerspace after an experience with a young patient named Brandon, who wanted to be an engineer. littleBits came to be a part of Project Mach – the first mobile hospital makerspace that Gokul founded. Combining donated littleBits kits and 3D printing, patients made some really amazing inventions at Vanderbilt Hospital in Tennessee. On top of that, kids were much more active – their average steps per day jumped from 300 to 1,500because of visiting the makerspace.
Mannas Magic Bell from Project M@CH on Vimeo.
littleBits believes in giving everyone the power to create inventions large and small, and is honored to be a part of this program as well as Adam Savage’s Tested. Watch Adam’s latest Maker Tour episode of Tested here.
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Grace Morales
littleBits education marketing coordinator
PS: Looking to start or supercharge your own makerspace? The littleBits STEAM Student Set brings powerful STEM/STEAM learning to your students. Another option is the new littleBits Code Kit — teach foundational coding skills while students build games in real life and code them in the desktop Code Kit app using drag-and-drop programming based on Google’s Blockly. Both Kits work great on their own, or you can expand the possibilities by using them together!
