With support from the National Science Foundation, Youth Radio wants to change the way young people think about science--and scientists. What better way to do that than to make science a media event? Youth Radio joined forces with David Pescovitz from the website Boing Boing and the Institute for the Future to invite a stellar line-up of inventors, engineers, and investigators to our studios in Oakland, Calif. For each segment in the series, our guests provide interactive hands-on demos and then take questions from Youth Radio interviewers.

Brains and Beakers II: Behind the Scenes at a How-To Machine

For our second Brains and Beakers workshop, Youth Radio hosted Eric Wilhelm, founder of instructables.com. Eric is an MIT-educated engineer and avid kite-surfer. He started making his own surfing equipment and then writing about it online. Soon, he picked up a following. Other people wanted to share their own projects and create a Do-It-Yourself community. And so instructables was born. Now, Eric’s running a business, but he still thinks like a scientist—isolating variables, making interventions, assessing data, and then starting that cycle again—to grow his enterprise.

In the first segment  [above- 3:36], Wilhelm elaborates on how he started the site and describes how it works.

In the second segment [2:50], you’ll learn about some of Wilhelm’s favorite projects on the site.

(download mp3)
In this video, Eric spotlights one instructables project: LED throwies. See how one group of artists used this technique to create illuminated graffiti.