June 7, 2016 marked the first iteration of a new type of maker event called MakerJam. This event is the brainchild of three of my students who first presented their plan for the event on my blog. Inspiration for this event was based on their experiences with game jams, hack-a-thons, hackfests and hack days; events that all involve focused collaboration and rapid creativity. The success of these events fueled these students’ desire to extend these types of events into making and makerspaces.
Dubbed “The maker event created by students, for students,” MakerJam perfectly captures the essence of what the Maker Movement in K-12 is all about. As an event designed to embrace the maker culture, the MakerJam model involved creating a fast-paced, collaborative environment that demands rapid creativity, innovation, teamwork, problem-solving, and open-ended exploration – while extending that platform to makers in all fields, including, but not limited to, art, music, and writing.
On an unseasonably warm Sunday this past April — Easter Sunday, in fact — over a thousand area school children and teens gathered in Cambridge for a special one-day event. (It was not an egg hunt.)
They were waiting in line to get into MIT’s Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center to experience the university’s MakerFest. Developed by a group of undergraduate and graduate students, MITxMake invited companies and organizations from across the region and the globe to ‘inspire attendees to think creatively about building products, finding inventive solutions to everyday problems, and get hands-on experience building something new’. Attendees gathered to eagerly assemble and rebuild creations with BRIXO’s new electricity-conducting building blocks; they squealed while constructing and programming basic robots with Makeblock, and enjoyed getting crafty with Chibitronics’ LED Circuit Stickers. They quickly manipulated the smart toys with MacGuyver-esque ingenuity, creating ‘outside the lines’ just as the visiting organizations had intended.
The Project Book is Ready! You read that correctly, the Omega2 Project Book is now available! It has 22 projects that are covered through the course of 28 tutorials. It’s available online right now! Check it out at: https://docs.onion.io/omega2-project-book-vol1/ Thank you all for your continued patience with the Project Book. We had many, many fires that needed to be put out before we could work on the Project Book full steam so that really delayed the release. However, we’re confident that you’ll learn a lot about the Omega2 as well as programming and electronics while making a bunch of awesome projects.
Documentation for all things Onion and Onion Omega2.
UC Berkeley’s newly remodeled undergraduate library is modern and sleek, with its top two floors featuring low-slung couches, a futuristic nap pod, and meeting spaces with glass walls made to be written on and colorful furniture meant to be moved.
The library has even dropped its rules against bringing in food and drinks on those floors. That’s because they no longer contain any books, which could be damaged or stained.
California’s oldest public university has removed 135,000 books from Moffitt Library, shipping most to other locations, to create more space for students to study, recharge and collaborate on group projects — a staple of college work today.
Kim Flintoff's insight:
Slightly misleading headline - university catalogues hold more entries than ever - more and more titles are held in accessible digital formats... hard copies don't scale well with 60,000 or more users who are not on site...
As maker-centered learning gains traction in schools around the country, district leaders in the League of Innovative Schools are pioneering best practices for implementing new programs. What does research have to say about maker learning? How do we measure and show the impact of these programs? At the fall 2016 meeting of the League of Innovative Schools, a group of leaders convened to address these questions together. This collaboration resulted in a webinar series that features the work of researchers and learning scientists from around the country.
Making is as old as learning itself. While the maker movement may only be about a decade old, the human desire to create dates back to the earliest forms of human activity, from making stone tools to drawing on cave walls (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014; Martinez & Stager, 2014). Thinkers such as Pestalozzi, Montessori, and Papert helped paved the way for the maker movement by stressing the importance of hands-on, student-centered, meaningful learning. Instead of viewing learning as the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, these thinkers embraced the idea that children learn best when encouraged to discover, play, and experiment.
More recently, maker education is being used as a way to connect do-it-yourself informal learning to classrooms. Driven by new technologies such as 3D printing, robotics, and kid-friendly coding, making is emerging as an effective way to introduce students to STEM, particularly women and minorities. By incorporating elements of making into the classroom, educators can bridge the gap between what students are passionate about and what they're learning in school.
Toy take apart and hacking is a high engagement activity that works for kids of all ages, including adults who haven’t lost their sense of kid, and both genders. I have done it multiple times during my summer maker camp for elementary level kids, my gifted students, and at conferences as part of teacher professional development.
Here is a description of this activity from the tinkering studio at the Exploratorium:
Do you ever wonder what’s inside your toys? You’ll make some exciting and surprising discoveries about their inner parts when you don some safety goggles and get started dissecting your old stuffed animal, remote controlled car, or singing Santa. Use screwdrivers, seam rippers, scissors, and saws to remove your toy’s insides. Check out the mechanisms, circuit boards, computer chips, lights, and wires you find inside. Once you’ve fully dissected your toy, you can use the toy’s parts, your tools, and your imagination to create a new original plaything. (https://tinkering.exploratorium.edu/toy-take-apart)
You've read about the maker movement. You've seen the posts with 3D printers, laser cutters, and three-axis mills in shiny new labs. And you want your students to start making, too. But you've got one big problem: you don't have a full lab -- or even a 3D printer -- because, like many educators, you don't have the biggest budget. Maybe you have no budget at all.
But what if you could get started making tomorrow and didn't need all the fancy tools to join this movement? Making starts with a mindset, and simple materials are all that you need to get started. There are resources all around you, materials hidden in plain sight, tools just waiting to be used for a creative purpose. And with a little dose of ingenuity, you'll have your students making in no time.
Another day, another would-be Raspberry Pi challenger, this time the tiny LicheePi Zero, which sells for as little as $6.
On paper, it has a faster and more modern processor than the Raspberry Pi Zero, the cheapest Raspberry Pi board, as well as offering Wi-Fi connectivity at a lower price. However, there are also several potential drawbacks to this Chinese-made competitor.
The LicheePi uses an Allwinner V3s system on a chip (SoC), based on the ARM Cortex-A7 core and capable of running at up to 1.2GHz. That's faster than the Pi Zero's Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, which runs at up to 1GHz and is based on an older ARM11 core.
A paper circuit is a low-voltage electronic circuit that is created on paper or cardboard using conductive copper tape, LEDs and a power source such as a coin-cell battery. Creating paper circuits is a good way to teach the basics of electricity and how circuits function. In addition to being educational, they can also be a fun makerspace project that helps to bring artwork and paper craft to life. By adding sensors, buzzers and motors to your circuit, you can also add another dimension of interactivity. These simple projects are great for all ages and all makerspaces.
This is a quite robust 3d-printable machine vise. It's 100% 3d-printed (no hardware needed). In this video I'm exploring properties of 3d-printed material. I'm also telling how the design of the vise was developed, how it is printed and assembled.
My work with schools across the Nation on planning and creating makerspaces has proven to me that while anyone can create a makerspace, there are distinct differences between makerspaces and GREAT makerspaces. GREAT makerspaces are unique to your school community, vibrant for now, and sustainable into the future. Recently on Instagram, I had a series …
In the 2015 New Media Consortium Horizon Report, makerspaces were recognized as one the six most important educational technology developments.
“Makerspaces are increasingly being looked to as a method for engaging learners in creative, higher-order problem-solving through hands-on design, construction, and iteration,” the report says.
As Laura Fleming, a library media specialist from New Milford (Conn.) High School, said in the Spring 2016 issue of EdTech: Focus on K–12, a good makerspace is one that puts the learner first.
In Texas, a 13-year-old boy built a robot that could rescue victims of natural disasters. In Georgia, a 15-year-old girl developed a device that alerts parents who have have left their child in the car. And in California, a 13-year-old boy created a Braille printer that would be almost six times cheaper than the currently available model.
Young people aren't just the future. They're the present, innovating and creatively solving problems in a range of fields. Students across the country, from every background, have the ability to build new products that could change lives around the world.
That's what educators at the forefront of the "Maker movement" believe. Leaders of this initiative are changing the American educational landscape by engaging kids in discovery-based learning from a young age, encouraging them to learn not just by watching, but by doing – to not only consume, but also create.
What if traditional high school transcripts -- lists of courses taken, grades earned and so forth -- didn't exist?
That's the ambition of a new education reform movement, which wants to rebuild how high schools record the abilities of students -- and in turn to change the way colleges evaluate applicants. Sounds like quite a task. But the idea is from a group with considerable clout and money: more than 100 private schools around the country, including such elite institutions as the Dalton School and the Spence School in New York City, plus such big guns as the Cranbrook Schools in Michigan, the Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and Miss Porter's School in Connecticut.
The organizers of the effort believe all kinds of high schools and colleges are ready for change, but they argue that it will take the establishment to lead this particular revolution. Organizers believe that if more than 100 such elite private schools embrace a new transcript, they will attract supporters in higher ed who will embrace the approach for fear of losing top applicants (both in terms of their academics and ability to pay). And then the plan could spread -- over perhaps a decade -- to public high schools as well. Along the way, the group hopes to use the ideas of competency-based education -- in which demonstration of mastery matters and seat time does not -- to change the way high schoolers are taught.
Kim Flintoff's insight:
Has some parallels with the work I'm doing at the moment. Notice the emphasis is on learner capabilities.
During April 2017 Michelle Jensen - Education installed two MakerSpaces in Nepal. One in a rural village school and the other at Heartbeat a drop in centre for Orphans. Michelle Jensen - Education will continue to support both spaces. The next phase is workshops to provide training to the communities of the spaces. We are always looking for support and sponsors for these projects, please contact Michelle if you are able to interested.
When the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at North Carolina State University opened in 2013, it seemed nary an innovation was left out. The 225,000‐square‐foot building includes multiple display walls running at a resolution six times better than high-def; a whacked out game lab; a wide visualization space; creativity studios; nearly a hundred group study rooms and learning spaces; glass walls and writable surfaces anywhere you might lay an erasable marker; bookBot, a robotic book storage center with capacity for 2 million volumes; reconfigurable seating and tables everywhere (including a reported 60 different types of designer furniture); plus high-performance computing (HPC) and high-speed storage.
It took 98 pages for the university to describe the entirety of the wonders of the Hunt Library in its application for the 2014 Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries (which it handily won).
One of the most fundamental skills a maker should be able to master is the ability to solder electronics. Whether you’re building a robot or working with Arduino, knowing how to solder will come in handy. The best thing about soldering is that it’s really fun to learn and easy to master.
What Is Soldering?
If you were to take apart any electronic device that contains a circuit board, you’ll see the components are attached using soldering techniques. Soldering is the process of joining two or more electronic parts together by melting solder around the connection. Solder is a metal alloy and when it cools it creates a strong electrical bond between the parts. Even though soldering can create a permanent connection, it can also be reversed using a desoldering tool as described below.
Kim Flintoff's insight:
When advising about Makerspace activities its fascinating to find how many people do not know the basic skill of soldering. This article is a step-by-step- guide.
One of the most fundamental skills a maker should be able to master is the ability to solder electronics. Whether you’re building a robot or working with Arduino, knowing how to solder will come in handy. The best thing about soldering is that it’s really fun to learn and easy to master.
What Is Soldering?
If you were to take apart any electronic device that contains a circuit board, you’ll see the components are attached using soldering techniques. Soldering is the process of joining two or more electronic parts together by melting solder around the connection. Solder is a metal alloy and when it cools it creates a strong electrical bond between the parts. Even though soldering can create a permanent connection, it can also be reversed using a desoldering tool as described below.
Over the last two years, Knight Foundation has funded 36 library innovation projects through two Knight News Challenges. As we closed our review of entries last spring in Miami, the library leaders in the room voiced a desire to learn more about what innovation means in a library context. It seemed like a good idea to us, too, so we took on the task. Today, we’re introducing some of the results of that work and our efforts to strengthen the capacity of public libraries to meet digital age demands. First, we’re releasing a guide for developing a library innovation agenda. Authored by MACHINE, “Developing Clarity: Innovating in Library Systems” is based on interviews with more than two dozen library leaders and a meeting of 40 library leaders that we hosted in Miami last month. The report takes on questions we heard during last year’s News Challenge: What does it mean for a public library to innovate? What new practices need to be developed, and what old ones need to be discarded? What does an effective innovation practice look like?
In a recent blog post, I presented the 7 Attributes of a GREAT Makerspace. These attributes are meant to serve as a guide for school districts and educators as they plan makerspaces for their school communities. One of those attributes is that GREAT makerspaces are DIFFERENTIATED and effectively meet the needs of mixed-ability learners..
One of the things mentioned in that post, was the idea of differentiating the process a student follows to make and create in a makerspace. Recently, I asked my PLN to contribute to a Padlet that asked them to share the process their students follow for making in their makerspace.
The Make to Learn web site was established to advance maker education. As the name implies, the site was established in the belief that it is possible to learn by making. The site features activities that were developed by a fabrication network (FabNet) of linked makerspaces. Collaborators in the FabNet coalition include the University of Virginia, Princeton University, Midland Technical College, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education, among others.
Looking for MakerEd ideas for your makerspace? Below is an EPIC bucket list of 100 awesome activities, inspirational ideas and gigantic goals for making, along with links to instructions, tutorials and related MakerEd resources. This is my personal list that I’m currently working through. I use it for focus and inspiration. I hope that it will inspire you. … Continue reading The MakerEd 100 ‘Must Do’ List
A couple of weeks ago, our Youth Programming Coordinator Michelle shared with us the importance of getting youngsters involved in maker education. One could argue, in fact, that an education absent of hands-on maker activities is lacking in a big way. The skill set required by the world and the economy in the coming decades is intimately linked to what is learned through a good maker education. Fortunately, the Maker Movement is making its way into classrooms around the world. We asked Michelle what her top 6 picks would be to help educators bring maker activities into their classrooms (each link leads to a lesson plan)!
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.
Your new post is loading...
