De Ontdekfabriek (translated) is best described as a children’s makerspace. This is what society needs everywhere! Public workshops for children to learn about making, fixing, and hacking things — what a society we would live in if every young person was taught how to repair things instead of just replacing them! We really hope to see places like this adopted around the world!

The space is filled with regular children’s things, large toys and statues.

Perhaps this was done to encourage what is possible, if only you try!

It has a full green screen set up for children to learn about video production and editing!

A small studio box for making movies of smaller toys and projects

And a live output display!

They have many work benches and a small selection of relatively safe tools to use on projects.

And big bins of broken toys to be hacked!

Or for the more advanced children, old electronics and appliances!

Tons of stuff to be used in projects!

We don’t know how much one of these kits would cost, but aluminium extrusion building blocks? Awesome! It’s like Meccano on steroids!
You can even build small vehicles out of it!

The space also has a veritable army of Ultimakers — they have a system set up with an existing library of parts in a catalog and children can pick the SD card they need, then load the file for the part they want to print. The example they had running was the alphabet so children could label their projects, in 3D!

They also have a big desk of hot wire cutters for forming Styrofoam for projects!
And some finger-proof drill presses!

You can simply slide your part in and drill away!

[Anthony] from Open Garage looks for project ideas because they want to run children programs back home in Antwerp at Open Garage and Void Warranties!

They have about 7 Ultimakers running, great for mass production!

This is a dolphin(?) with motion sensors attached to a game on the television. We were tempted to try it but didn’t want to break it! You actually lean around to control the game!
Does this children’s makerspace give you ideas to start one in your city? We hope so!

Filed under: Hackerspaces