In what ways are you creating the conditions to inspire your learners to take risks and innovate in your makerspace? Nation of Makers – A national nonprofit dedicated to helping support America’s maker organizations through advocacy, resource sharing, and the building of community within the maker movement and beyond.
From Tinkering to Technology—Advice from a Middle School Maker. Middle schooler Hannah Levenberg always liked taking things apart, but she didn’t make the connection between her tinkering and technology until she took a class from Mr.
Moredock. He taught her how to code in her seventh grade Innovation and Design class at Redwood Day School. Making Starts Here. Building STEAM Skills with Hands-On Activity Collections. By Cody Coltharp, Digital Interactive Designer, Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access When I work with teachers around the country demonstrating the Learning Lab, many have mentioned the challenge of integrating technology in ways that are both engaging and easy to implement in a classroom environment.
In response, I've created six "activity collections," which are teaching collections that combine Smithsonian digital resources with fun hands-on activities to develop STEAM skills: All six activities include lesson plans containing materials lists, step-by-step facilitation instruction, and ideas for scaling the activities up or down. The STEAM activities and facilitators' guides are available at the links above for anyone interested in replicating or adapting the lessons in their own school or in an after-school program. Click on the links above to access the individual activity collections and feel free to copy, adapt, and share them. 15 Ideas To Go Beyond Makers Space: Building a Makers Culture. 15 Ideas To Go Beyond Makers Space… Building a Makers Culture As I travel across the country it is wonderful to see all the schools building a Makerspace somewhere in their school.
Each time I see this I am impressed by the educator, or group of educators, trying to make such a space possible for their school. After all, a Makerspace allows students to imagine, envision, create, innovate, play, learn in a formative manner, simulate, experiment, collaborate, think critically, communicate, share, synthesize, invent, evaluate, and most of all dream of new possibilities. These are the very verbs that make up the 4 C’s, Blooms Hierarchy, and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge. I usually ask those teachers to reflect on the idea of building a space… or building a culture for making and creating. Tips for meaningful making. How can we use maker programs to inspire learning and curiosity across the student spectrum?
Educators Mark Barnett, Ana Josephson and Patrick Benfield Digital offered advice and resources for launching maker programs during their panel discussion at this year’s TCEA Annual Convention & Exposition in Austin, Texas. Be patient and support teachers. Maker programs don’t happen overnight, said Ana Josephson of the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders. It takes time; it may not happen the first or second year.
Support teachers. Learn from others. Learning Center,Desktop Graphics Cards. Graphics cards today are responsible for much more than sending simple text output to a monitor.
Their duties now include heavy-duty 2D and 3D rendering as well as video processing. The output devices they support include not only CRT monitors, but TVs, video recorders, LCDs and HDTV sets as well. To do this, graphics cards are often equipped with a combination of I/O ports/interfaces. ^ Back to top D-Sub/VGA This 15-pin VGA output port finds widespread usage and is responsible for connection to CRT monitors and LCD monitors that support analog input. LCDs operate on digital signals, but some older graphics cards output only analog signals through the analog D-Sub port. This means, according to what has been said in the D-Sub section, that a digital signal is converted to analog and then reconverted from analog to digital again.
Soft Electronics Tutorials. Specialized Materials The tools and materials for creating soft circuits are pretty standard: you need your electronic components and their tools, and your soft materials and their tools.
Anything that conducts electricity can be interesting here: snaps can be switches; hooks and eyes can too. There is only one special ingredient: conductive thread. This embroidery-floss-like material is the wire that makes soft circuits possible. Five-year olds and laser cutters—perfect together? Welcome to the first early childhood fab lab. SAN FRANCISCO — A few weeks ago, at the Bay Area Discovery Museum (BADM) near San Francisco, five-year-old Jack Stabenow climbed a step stool to peer into a machine that cuts cardboard with a high-powered laser.
The red beam precisely followed a squiggly building design that Jack had just finger-drawn on a tablet computer. Jack’s goal was to make a building that could stand up to the wind of a nearby table fan. With his cardboard cut, Jack hurried to the assembly area where about two dozen other kids his age labored over teetering, but well-taped, creations.
If these first attempts toppled in the breeze, that was to be expected. How to Kickstart Maker Education.
Raspberry Pi. A Makerspace Is Within Your Reach! You've no doubt read countless blogs and articles about the incredible impact makerspaces can have in schools.
You may even have started rearranging your space, or perhaps you've created an Amazon wish list. But after being a maker-librarian for nearly two years, I can assure you that you should really stop thinking about starting a makerspace ... and just do it. I spent a solid year planning my makerspace. I developed a vision statement and set goals. I made an infographic for my administration, listing standards that would be addressed. At conferences I went to everything with the word "maker" in the title. Which is why I strongly recommend you stop thinking about starting your makerspace and just get started. Creating is not just a 'nice' activity; it transforms, connects and empowers. As a child, when I wasn’t eating, sleeping or at school, I was making.
Q&A with Makerspaces Innovator Laura Fleming on the Best Creative Spaces in K–12. Laura Fleming has quite a bit of knowledge about makerspaces.
She’s created them at the elementary, middle and high school levels. A former classroom teacher, Fleming became a library media specialist at New Milford High School in New Jersey at the behest of her principal, Eric Sheninger, also a well-known education figure. Fritzing. Beyond books: School libraries add makerspaces to give students hands-on experience with technology. The electric 3-D pen kept jamming, so the two students decided to build a centuries-old piece of technology called a trebuchet instead. They knew the wood structure's history from when medieval armies used it to hurl bodies infested with the bubonic plague. In less menacing times, Amy Schwartz and Oliva Stahl, both 12, were building a smaller version so they could launch a tiny ball. The Southern Lehigh Middle School students were building the trebuchet as part of a new library program started at the school last fall. Intel Presents America's Greatest Maker. Should students learn coding? Students, schools disagree, poll finds.
SAN FRANCISCO — Parents across the U.S. are eager for their children to learn coding and other computer-science skills, but their message hasn't yet hit the in-box of school administrators. That's the finding of a new Gallup study commissioned by Google that spotlights a potentially perilous economic disconnect as tech companies struggle to enlarge their engineering talent pools. In the works for 18 months, the survey, called "Searching for Computer Science: Access and Barriers in U.S. K-12 Education," polled 15,000 people ranging from students to superintendents. Among key and contrasting findings: while 90% of parents see computer science, or CS, as "a good use of school resources" (and 67% say CS should be required learning alongside other core classes), fewer than 8% of administrators believe parent demand is high.
They also cite a lack of trained teachers as a top barrier to offering CS courses. Tips, Tricks, & Ideas: Our Wall of Materials. Our wall of materials gets photographed pretty frequently by visitors who want to know what we keep on-hand for our making, so I thought I’d share it with all of you. We store most of our materials in clear, plastic bins. These are color-coded by general making activity, and age range. Materials like white glue get stored near the bottom (where even kindergarteners can reach them), while more advanced materials like LEDs and motors get stored up top.
Here’s the breakdown: Note: I’m not finding an easy way to put these in some sort of table/column form, which is unfortunate. Top Left (Yellow) Middle School Maker Journey: Shop Class Rebooted. . . Digitally. "Have you seen this video? " 8 Design Steps for an Academic Makerspace. Why the Maker Movement Should Be Here to Stay. Playing, Learning, and Making things light up in City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection. ISTE 2015: Takeaway Tips for a Library Maker Space.
Maker station at the ISTE Librarians Digital Age Playground at the 2015 ISTE conference in Philadelphia. Easel.ly - create Infographics online. Maker Faire Goes Online With A New Social Network For Makers Called MakerSpace. IMLS & Children’s Museum to Partner on Makerspaces Project. Makerspaces And The Maker Movement. Library MakerSpaces on Pinterest. Innovation Labs and Makerspaces. #SXSWEdu: Making makers: From Guatemala to the world.
Howtoons. MakerFaire. Open Portfolio Project. Thingiverse - Digital Designs for Physical Objects. #FETC: Learning in a transformative decade. Skills. How the 'maker culture' brings the power of design to life. Illustration: Douglas Wittnebel Back in the early 1980’s, I got to experience firsthand the wild and vivid performances of Survival Research Laboratories. My roommate was the girlfriend of Mark Pauline, the founder of the group and one of the minds behind machine artists like Matt Heckler and Eric Werner. DIY projects, how-tos, and inspiration from geeks, makers, and hackers. Instructables - DIY How To Make Instructions.