On April 14, 2018 at the initiative of the US Diplomatic Mission the first festival in Central Asia - Maker Faire was organized in American Space Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Maker Faire - is a large-scale practical event in the show-and-tell format, which demonstrates innovation, creativity and experiments. The first Faire Maker was held in 2006 in California, and since then, 44 cities around the world, including Seoul, Moscow and Delhi, have conducted similar festivals.

Almaty Mini Maker Faire 2018 is a festival for the whole day, which brought together "creators" from five countries of Central Asia and Afghanistan. The aim of the festival is to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship, promote cooperation in the field of education, as well as motivate engineers, computer scientists and artists to develop and implement creative ideas for solving urgent problems.

Special guests from the USA addressed the event, paying special attention to education and its importance. Matthew Klein of the online educational platform Coursera introduced online learning as a new paradigm for learning of the 21st century. Sarah Klatterbak, a representative of Technovation, spoke about the contribution of women and girls in the search for solutions to world problems through technology.

More than 60 projects were presented at the festival, ranging from robotics and rockets to Tesla coils and electronic textiles. Siemens offered small sessions of virtual reality, demonstrating the energy of the future for visitors throughout the day. Maker Faire is unique in that it combines ideas and cooperation that would otherwise seem incompatible: coding with craft, electronics with design, virtual reality with environmental problems, robotics with health and mechanics with art..

The bright moment of Almaty Mini Maker Faire was the KZ Pitch Challenge presentation contest, in which twelve social projects took part, among them there was an intern-surgeon of the Karaganda State Medical University Eliarbek Tashmetov with the project "Neuro-rehabilitation exoskeleton" Custodian ". By decision of the panel of judges led by US Consul General Mark Moody, the project of Eliarbek Tashmetov and 4 other projects became the winners of the festival.