Tag: maker movement

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Makers in the Making PBL (Project-Based Learning)

(Re)Making Learning: Creating a Space for Young Makers

Many educators are looking for tactical ways to bring the buzz of the maker movement to their schools and classrooms. In an effort to support educators and open-source the implementation process, here is a glimpse inside how one community in the Bay Area is redesigning their learning spaces.

LosRobles Makerspace

Robert Pronovost, STEM Coordinator for Ravenswood City School District in EPA is bringing the maker movement to life through the Ravenswood Makerspace Collaborative.  In partnership with Mario Cuellar, After School STEM Coordinator, and with support from his district, Pronovost transformed a portable at the back of a school into a vibrant and engaging space for students to tinker and explore hands-on learning opportunities.

Prototyping a Pilot

This video depicts early user testing Pronovost conducted to get a sense of what the students were most interested in and how best to design the space and curriculum around those interests. In keeping with the open-source ethos, Pronovost shares much of the reading and research he conducted to fuel his efforts and adds that “‘Invent To Learn‘ by Sylvia Martinez & Gary Stager, Ph.D. is a must read.” The curriculum which serves TK-8th graders currently focuses on three main areas; coding, making and robotics, which clearly have overlapping activities and learning goals. Pronovost then adds a layer of design thinking concepts across these three content areas, introducing kids to empathy building, rapid prototyping and user-centered design. For a deeper look into this process he has documented details of designing the space and curriculum on his own blog, ElementaryEdtech.

The space is equipped with a couple 3D printers, a laser cutter, several chromebooks and a set of BeeBots. Add in carts with the standard prototyping materials (post-its, pipe cleaners, etc) and you’re ready to go. Maintaining materials is a work-in-progress and he shares a list of other tools/materials they would love to get donated.

During this pilot period students are free to tinker in the space during recess and after-school time, however, as this initiative secures more funding the plan is to hire a full-time instructor and expand the content offering.

Robert w/Kids

Next Up

What began as a pilot at Los Robles Magnet Academy this past January will scale to the 7 other schools in the district this fall. In addition to expanding the sites, the goal is to broaden the content offering to include all students and not just those that currently choose to attend. In exploring models from other schools, Pronovost is considering a 4-6 week ‘Intro to STEM’ course that all 4th and 5th graders would rotate through.

Beyond serving EPA, the Ravenswood Makerspace Collaborative was recently selected to join the small and prestigious group of makerspaces in Stanfords’s FabLab@School network. In participating in this program they will likely collaborate with students at another makerspace in Russia or Thailand.

To further engage the local community and share learnings from this early pilot, Pronovost will be hosting an Open Make Day in May. (Details are still TBD.) If you’re interested in learning more about building a makerspace in your community, a good place to start is requesting a free copy (downloadable pdf) of the Makerspace Playbook.

 

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Entrepreneurship Makers in the Making

Creating a Culture of i-Can

Where was this when I was young? I’ve been researching various STEM learning programs and recently came across Imagineerz, a design-thinking focused summer camp for elementary school kids.

WebOFMain2

Imagineerz is the brainchild of Vaibhavi Gala, a fellow alum of the Stanford Graduate School of Education (ICE ’00), whose high school dream was to create a student-centered learning experience focusing on creativity and confidence building. Once her own children were in elementary school she knew the timing was right to explore her inner entrepreneur.

In March 2011 Gala decided to take the plunge, quitting her comfortable job in corporate training to focus on creating an experience for kids ‘to become positive and confident makers.’ The first program started in the summer of 2011 and in their 4th year of programming this summer they will serve approximately 75 students a week for four weeks in July. Building on her Stanford experience, she often recruits interns from the GSE to help her with the ongoing program and curriculum design.

As the camp and community grows Imagineerz is looking to deepen engagement with parents and kids during the year through a series of books and apps. With all the recent attention on the maker movement (the White House just announced their first MakerFaire), it would be amazing to see this type of programming become part of the K12 experience.

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PBL (Project-Based Learning) Tech in the classroom

Pleasant from the Beginning…

 

It’s that time of year when most of us are resting, reflecting and resolving to start (or stop) doing things in the coming months. My recent reflecting lead me back to Paulo Bilkstein’s research paper, Travels in Troy with Freire, which captures some of the key education theories and thinkers behind the current maker movement in education. In thinking about designing effective learning environments, there are so many factors to consider, however I agree with Freire’s thinking that the trick is to balance the rigor with the fun. He captures this perfectly, stating that “it is important the child realize, from the beginning, that studying is difficult and demanding, but is pleasant from the beginning.”

KA Discovery Lab

The biggest potential technology offers is to serve as an ‘agent of emancipation’ as Bilkstein puts it, empowering learners to see themselves as creators and not just consumers. If we praise the current edtech movement for simply shifting students from boring offline lectures & exercises to slightly less boring online lectures & exercises, what is so pleasant about that?

I speak with many edtech entrepreneurs and while I don’t expect everyone working in this space to be an expert on education theory, I think this paper offers valuable insights for anyone exploring the intersection of education and technology. I hope some of you will find it useful and even more hopeful that 2014 will offer some pleasant education innovations. Happy New Year!

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Edu Startups PBL (Project-Based Learning) Tech in the classroom

Meograph: Storytelling as a Service

Meograph for Edu
Storytelling is the oldest form of communication and such an essential aspect of our communities. While anyone can tell a story, as an art form, it significantly improves as the storyteller is coached and inspired. Meograph seeks to empower each of us to tell our stories in a digitally rich way without requiring deep knowledge of complex and expensive creative products. Current SF resident and founder Misha Leybovich has always been a natural storyteller (at one point in his career he was a clown at kids’ parties), but struggled using the existing creative tools.  So he founded Meograph, which he refers to as ‘Adobe for anybody,’ to help tell his own stories and make this rich digital storytelling process accessible to everyone. (You may recognize him from his pitch at the January SF Edtech Meetup- Teacher Tank.)

With the surge of interest in the ‘flipped classroom,’ Meograph saw many teachers bringing this tool to their classrooms, creating content themselves as well as assigning projects for students to craft their own stories. This student created story on the ‘Causes of the Civil War‘ is a cool example of some of the projects created using Meograph.

This step of simplifying the creation process is critical to ensuring widespread adoption of project-based learning strategies, where studente take control of their own learning, document their progress and demonstrate understanding. While Meograph didn’t intend to be an ‘edtech’ startup they have responded well to the significant interest and feedback from the educator community on how this can be used as a learning tool.

Beyond bringing life back to current presentation methods, the larger vision is to power some of the Maker Movement rhetoric by simplifying the creation and sharing process. Striving to be the next suite of creative tools, Meograph is working on creating an authoring tool that can be embedded on other websites. Next steps for the team is to figure out deeper classroom support such as connecting these stories/projects to lesson plans and creating a rubric for grading and assigning project. You can learn more and connect with the team on Twitter @Meograph or email them at meograph@meograph.com.

(And if you happen to be at SXSW this week check out their pitch during the Startup Accelerator on Monday March 11th. Good luck!)