Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Maker Mania

After a brief hiatus (maybe a bit longer than brief), I’m back to talk about the launch of our exciting new space we’ve created for making and tinkering here at ESH this year.

Nursery to Grade 2 students here at ESH make in many different ways all the time, and we had been talking about the idea of creating a space for making and tinkering for some time. 
Early last school year, one of our 1st Grade teachers, Ms. Landry, decided to provide a making/tinkering option for her students during their free choice time. So I started helping make and tinker with a group of hard-core tinkerers and makers in her classroom who constantly challenged themselves and me with questions about how things worked and with wanting to tinker and make. We had fun building all kinds of interesting contraptions such as a conveyer belt, a cable car, fans, electric circuits, paper speakers for an iPhone/iPad, bristlebots, a walking marker robot, and motorized cars and spinners. We also tinkered with and took apart things like a camera, speakers, and an iPad. I was hooked.

But things really started to move forward later last school year and into summer break. Our Primary School principal, Susan Devetski, and Ms. Landry attended a Project Zero conference with a “Making” strand through Harvard last spring. We started having conversations about making at faculty meetings last spring and we held a “Maker Playdate” during which teachers had the opportunity to select from a wide range of making activities such as circuits, building catapults, battery powered cars, cardboard, LEDs and magnets, crafts, and stop motion animation using iPads, to name a few.

Our principal then brought in a speaker on a Professional Development day to continue the dialogue. A Makerspace committee consisting of teachers, the principal, and myself was formed and met at the end of last school year and in the summer to investigate and map out what a space might look like. We identified storage requirements, tools, consumables, and anything we thought we might need. We scoured the building for available spare shelving and furniture, and identified storage bins, tools, and supplies to purchase to get started. We also decided to designate a section of our shelving and storage space to house a reusable section stocked with all sorts of reusable materials such as plastic bottles, cardboard, plastic bottle caps, corks, boxes, tubes, etc. In addition, our faculty summer reading was the book, Make: Making Makers - Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation, with the purpose of coming together to discuss our own experiences and how we might relate to the maker characteristics of the individuals in the book.

As shelving was moved in and set up in our space, and storage bins, tools, and materials began to arrive, the committee met several times to begin to discuss logistics and scheduling. We also reached out to other individuals who already have Makerspaces in place and could provide us with any guidance. 

This past fall, we brought in a Makerspace coordinator from Atlanta and he facilitated a discussion about making and creativity and led all of ESH faculty in a maker activity in which we created an automata, or a hand-cranked cardboard machine.

After a lot of “outfitting the space” work, reading, discussion, and professional development to create a dialogue and reach an understanding of what a Makerspace could be, we still felt there would never be a perfect time to start. So, with some foundation beneath us, we jumped in.

We created a preliminary schedule based on 40 minute periods and asked 1st grade teachers to sign up for two periods per week for approximately five weeks with me facilitating and supporting the project and space. I met with teachers several times during grade level meetings to design a challenge based on a field trip they had all taken to a pumpkin farm. Coming up and agreeing on a focused, yet open-ended prompt that would allow students to use their imagination and be creative was challenging. There was much discussion about what and how much content, structure, and scaffolding to provide. We used portions of the book, Invent to Learn, by Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager, to help identify what makes a good prompt or challenge. Our prompt was, “Create something to help a farmer transport harvested pumpkins from the field to the barn for curing.” Several teachers signed up for the first round including Ms. Landry, Ms. Luna, and Ms. Wagonheim. 

With students working in pairs, we lead the students through the process of brainstorming, drawing a blueprint, building, testing, and revising their creations. With each class, we varied the introduction of and/or helped explain various concepts such as wheels and axles, wedges, ramps, force, friction, etc., either prior to their building or during as they worked.

Students were excited about the process of making and were completely engaged in building their pumpkin movers. They used baby pumpkins to test and improve their contraptions which ranged from a variety of ornately decorated wheeled vehicles to a hand-cranked conveyor belt.

We all learned a lot and are still learning about managing and facilitating the making experience and the physical space itself and have some new ideas on where to go from here.

More to come…



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