Freiburg Maker Educator Meet-Up (Glühen)

For the past five years or so, I’ve been living in Freiburg im Breisgau in the southwest corner of Germany. In that time I’ve been interested to connect with local makers, artists and educators who are exploring the playful side of STEAM (or MINT as the acronym goes in German). I’ve worked on many collaborations leading workshIops for kids and families and have also offered fun and informal professional development workshops for educators.

One thing that I’ve been wanting to start is an ongoing series of Maker Educator Meetups inspired by the BAME events in the San Francisco Bay Area initiated by Maker Ed and The Exploratorium. Last week I collaborated with local educator Julia Kreß to put on the first experimental event to bring together local playful maker educators, share updates, get to know each other and tinker together.

For the December month we picked the theme of Glühen (or Glow) and experimented with building a light-up cardboard city using conductive tape, LEDs and coin cell batteries. It was really interesting to see how the group all came with different backgrounds and experience levels with tinkering. Some jumped right in and others needed a few minutes to get started experimenting with materials.

It was a short working session (only about 30 minutes) but in the end we added our creations together to make a festive cardboard village with blinking and flashing lights. We spend a few minutes reflecting on the experience, noticing how we collaborated on something larger than our own projects, had a wide variety of ideas to test and all could have spent longer working through additional prototypes.

I’m hoping to continue this project with quarterly meet-ups in the next year. The next Freiburg Maker Educator Meetup is scheduled for March 5th, 2026 with the host and theme to be determined. Over the coming months, I’m looking forward to figuring out how to sustain this initiative both financially and creatively with interesting topics and formats that are relevant to our local community.