LA Makerspace founder Tara Tiger Brown shares her favorite tools

Tara Tiger Brown is the founder of nonprofit organization LA Makerspace, the premier STEAM service provider for the Los Angeles Public Library. She’s also the co-founder of Kithub, creative electronics kits for kids, and co-founder of Connected Camps, which has online camps for kids including a Minecraft coding club.

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Show Notes:

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Fujifilm Instax Share Smartphone Printer SP-1, $(removed)

"What's great about this is it's really small and portable. You can stick it in a little bag and it has a built-in wi-fi hotspot. That means that I can take my smartphone, install their app … you take your photo or you pick photos that you already have on your iPhone or Android photo list. Even from Instagram or Facebook. You hook up to the little printer's hotspot and you print. It's so great."

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The Art of Tinkering, $(removed)

"Open up this book and discover how to hack it … You know it's great if you're new to tinkering I think in a lot of ways because they have really great photos of the process and then also the end result. It's not a ton of reading. It doesn't feel really technical. It all feels just like something that's really do-able."

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Burner app, $(removed) (subscription)

"You may have heard of what a burner is if you watched The Wire or something. The idea is that it’s basically a throw-away phone or phone number … So they made an app based around that concept … In the app what you do is you can have one or more of these temporary phone numbers and you can decide how long you want them to live for. You can extend them if you want to. You can burn them, get rid of them if you want to."

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Product Hunt, Free

“[Product Hunt] is a great discovery tool to learn what the latest and greatest is out there… When apps are discovered by different product hunt curators, you can actually vote on them … the other feature on here that's really helpful is called Collections. That's where you know if there is somebody that you think does a really good job at curating. Different apps and things, follow them and then check out the different collections that they've created. That makes its a lot easier to find things that might be good for you."