Cool and unique projects to "make"

This first site makes me wonder if you need to be a musician, an electronics specialist or both.

Creating your first synthesizer....this would be such a great project to do with groups of students in a competition atmosphere. The Sound Maker Project website gives you all of the directions needed to create a "Weird Sound Generator " (WSG) out of just about anything, and well, people have done just that. Various pictures have been submitted by by developers who have made their WSGs out of things like lunch boxes, an IKEA key box, plastic toys, VHS plastic cases, even a stuffed teddy bear....are just a few of the great projects.

Would love to hear if anyone takes this on with their classes!

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Make: technology on your time is a great website. I have spoken about it before and it is worth revisiting again. I was in San Francisco in 2005 for the FlashForward conference and I picked up the first Make magazine that was published and have been hooked on Make ever since. Published by the computer publisher O'Reilly....it is a combination of "Geek meets MacGyver" (for those of you who don't know the television character MacGyver...he was a laid back secret agent who was always in trouble with the bad guys and could make bombs out of paper clips or machine guns out of a pencil.)

Some of these unique projects are posted from avid fans or you can purchase a kit online from Make. For example, how to make your own strobe light for a camera or how about making your own USB charger for your iPod or other gadgets.

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And as we move into our Winter months here in New Zealand....how about a website that makes snowflakes.

Make-a-flake is a fun interactive website created with Flash. Use a pair of digital scissors to cutout and create your own snowflake which you can post to a gallery (or use a cropper tool to save to your computer).