12-year-old Quin Etnyre is a Maker and teacher

Quin Etnyre is only 12 years old, but he is already an accomplished Maker working to change the world – one Atmel-powered Arduino board at a time.

Indeed, Quin’s Twitter biography reads: “I’m a 12-year-old maker that loves Arduino and electronics. I run my own electronics company selling @ArduSensors and will be going to MIT in 7 years.”

Quin recently launched a company dubbed “Qtechknow” which manufactures ArduSensors, ultimately negotiating a deal with SparkFun to sell the Qtechknow kit en masse.

Jeff Branson, SparkFun’s educational outreach coordinator, says Quin is a “bellwether” for a whole generation of Maker kids, many who haven’t even been identified yet.

“We’re seeing more and more kids like Quin getting together and teaching each other,” Branson told PopSci.

For his part, Quin says he is rethinking K–12 education, coming up with a much better system called the “New Qtechknow School.”

“School is pretty boring, but it could be a lot more interesting and interactive. More hands-on and more mentoring,” the young Maker explained. “It’s fun to teach other kids, and little kids look up to older kids. It helped me learn when I was young because it was fun.”

In addition to Quin’s Qtechknow kit, the  Maker is also known for his FuzzBot which he built using the Pololu ZumoBot Chassis Kit for Arduino, an Arduino Leonardo (ATmega32u4), a pan/tilt small servo and a Parallax Ping Ultrasonic Distance Sensor. As Makezine’s Stett Holbrook notes, Quinn  programmed most of the code himself using the Arduino IDE, ZumoBot and the Ping libraries for Arduino.

You can read more about Quin the Maker here, the FuzzBot on Instructables and the Qtechknow on Sparkfun.