As I grabbed the 10K resistor and screw from the Styrofoam cup, I glanced at the other kids in my Intro to Robotics class at HEROES Rutgers.

HEROES is an academy that offers a variety of classes to talented students. It was my second class. I took my gadgets back to our hard-bottomed stools and saw my classmates scurry around for their equipment. Most of them were geeky, with professional computers, software, and laptops loaded with every video game.

“Ahem, let’s move on with our robot sensors…”

Before attending HEROES, I had never been exposed to “making.” I never expected that kids my age would be interested in inventing and robotics. But soon after my first class, I discovered the world of “makers.”

Makers are a subculture of people who invent and explore new technologies to create something of their own. There are many different types of people who fall under the category of makers. Makers can include: builders, designers, manufacturers, fabricators, architects, inventors, hackers, and more. A maker can be as high-tech as a 3-D printer designer, or as simple as someone making a DIY birthday card. A hacker, a type of maker, is someone who takes everyday items and hacks (modifies) them to make something new.

As I researched the movement, I found magazines like Make, which now has over 100,000 subscribers and holds annual Maker Faires, with attendees from tinkerers to engineers to artists. The Maker Faire has many kids and adults set up their own projects on a stand, and explain them to their audience. The stands include jewelry, robots, clothing, music, and models. I wondered if the increasing population of makers will affect the future of our society. After all, the Wright Brothers started out as boys who tried making a toy helicopter. I always knew that scientists create their own technologies and programs. Steve Jobs invented and built his own computer with a partner in his garage! Steve Jobs is highly respected in the maker movement now — he was an innovator like many makers hope to be today.

My robotics teacher at HEROES, David Peins, is another example of a talented maker. David is the founder and president of Robodyssey Systems, a company that develops educational robotic programs for children. As a young child he liked working on things and taking them apart. After working in many manufacturing companies in engineering, he started teaching electronics classes at the high school level. He started Robodyssey when he asked students to make something move with the circuits they built.

“They started building things that moved very poorly at first,” David said in class, “but they started asking how they could make things more precisely so that they could gain mobility and function for their robots. My school did not have machine shop but my friend Charlie did, so on personal days and holidays I filled the requests of my students and Robodyssey was born.”

Every one of his students counts as a maker, because each student uses his or her imagination to make, design or create some product.

HEROES, believing in the imagination of kids, encourages young makers by offering classes in programming, breadboarding, and inventing. Breadboarding is the act of constructing an experimental circuit for the purpose of feasibility tests. I took Intro to Robotics and Intermediate Robotics, where our goal was to make a line-following robot. I entered that class with no knowledge of robots, resistors, transistors, LEDS, voltage regulators, or circuits, but my teacher guided us through every step.

Robotics is only one of the many facets of “making.” There are many faces of making, including urban gardening, 3-D printing, or knitting. On Make magazine’s website, there are projects in art, craft, engineering, music, food, green design, science, technology, and health. Simply making a DIY halloween costume counts as making!

During class, I realized that kids can be makers too. As my teacher David Peins told me in class, they can create devices that engineers would have trouble imagining. A maker can be anyone, a kid, an expert, a scientist, an adult. When I realized this, I noticed that kids are a big part of the movement. There are countless DIY YouTube channels run by kids, and a large number of kids who like to create their own stuff, such as bracelets.

At my robotics class, my line-following robot consisted of a red plastic base, an arduino, a bunch of wires, and some wheels. A line-following robot is simply a robot that is programmed to follow a certain line. It was a process that took over two months to finish. When half my robot was finished, I felt proud to have gone from knowing nothing to making a functioning robot.

We had to learn how to use a soldering iron, when I wasn’t even allowed to iron my own clothes. We had a competition to see whose robot would make it to the end of the line without stopping. On the first try, none of the robots could make it more than a few steps. But after trial and error, my robot was acing the test.

A few months after my robot was finished, my family was throwing out an old ceramic bowl and I began to think of ways I could hack the bowl into something useful. I thought about making the bowl into a flower pot, or using it as a sound projector for my iPod. After seeing all the astonishing projects created from simple items, I began to look at objects in different ways. I was inspired after watching others make things, and from the pride I felt after making my own robot. Making has no limits — all it requires is some imagination, determination, and a bit of work.