Mark Frauenfelder

“Skillshare is a terrific online learning community for creative people. It teaches you new skills through well-made videos with great production values. I've been using Skillshare to teach myself Adobe After Effects. All the videos feature people who are professionals in their field. I love this site.”

“I wrote and illustrated a science experiment book called 'The Mad Professor'.”

“The maker movement is about people who want to gain more control of the human design world that they interact with every day. Instead of accepting off-the-shelf solutions from institutions and corporations, makers would like to make, modify, and repair their own tools, clothing, food, toys, furniture, and other physical objects.”

“When you give a homemade gift, you are giving a part of yourself to the recipient. You can't do that with a mass-produced item.”

“My problem with mechanical pencils is that I break the lead tips constantly.”

“My friend Josh Glenn compiles terrific lists of genre novels from the mid-20th century. His latest is a list of the ten best adventure novels of 1966. Josh also includes the cover art of early editions of the books, which are always much better than the art on newer editions. I want to read every book in this list!”

“If you build your own chair, there is a lot of things that happen. You could probably buy a nice chair for less money than a chair that you built yourself, and it might even look better, but if you build that chair, you're going to take care of it and maintain it because it's your chair. If it breaks, you know how to fix it.”

“Fear of failure held me back from being a DIYer for many years, especially after a few early attempts at home improvement projects went awry.”

“In this beginner-friendly book, called 'Learn to Program with Minecraft,' you will learn how to do cool things in Minecraft using the Python programming language. No prior programming experience is needed.”

“We're trained in school to equate mistakes with bad grades - something to be avoided at all costs. The alpha makers were somehow able to dodge that. They think that mistakes are just part of the creative process and maybe even the best way to learn.”

“My advice for raising daughters is to spend time with them doing things you both enjoy.”

“As the editor-in-chief of the do-it-yourself magazine 'Make,' I've met scores of dedicated makers. They come from all walks of life - rich, poor, young, old, male, female, religious, atheist, liberal, conservative.”

“The Cat Dancer is a 30-inch piece of wire with some little cardboard cylinders on the end. My cats go crazy for it. I stuck it on the wall with the adhesive mount, but I ended up taking it off so I could hold it and play directly with my cats.”

“My idea of a traditional holiday - the right way to do it - goes back to the days when gift-giving meant sharing homemade things: hand-knit sweaters, carved wooden toys, smoked meats and the like.”

“John Edgar Park introduced me to the gentle art of recreational lock-picking. It's fun and potentially useful to know how to tickle tumblers in the right way to open door locks and padlocks.”

“The human-made world is mostly beyond our comprehension. Our daily survival depends on seemingly magical gizmos that provide our food, water, clothing, comfort, transportation, education, well-being, and amusement.”

“I can't imagine how much time it took Matt Bucy to cut up 'The Wizard of Oz' and reassemble every word of dialog into alphabetical order. The resulting movie is called 'Of Oz the Wizard.'”

“Kids don't need to be taught the value of making; they are natural makers, at least until traditional education makes them afraid of making mistakes. The long-term value of making for kids is in learning to become an active participant in the world around them rather than a consumer of prepackaged products and solutions.”

“Windell Oskay is the co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, a Silicon Valley company that has designed and produced specialized electronics and robotics kits since 2007.”

“Here's one of my bad habits: when I go to someone's house, I head straight to their bookshelf.”