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Maker Movement

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Can the Maker Movement Infiltrate Mainstream Classrooms? Gmail. How Librarians Are Rockin' the Makerspace Movement | graphite Blog. Maker Education Activities. This coming summer I am getting the opportunity to teach a maker education camp for three weeks, half-days at a local elementary school. The descriptions for the three one-week workshops are: Circuit Crafts: Build glowing, sensing, and interactive circuit projects; make electronic stickers, circuit sketchbooks, circuit cards, and sewn circuits.Sweet Robotics: Make simple robotics using Popsicle sticks and LED lights; play with and build some robots with Makey Makey, littleBits, Hummingbird, and Modular Robotics.Toy Hacking: Take apart simple electronic toys to see how they work & then put them back together again creating a new toy; make an operation game.

I created a website in order to aggregate possible activities, resources, and tutorials; and as a means to promote the workshops to parents, so they can see examples projects that the kids will be working on. Below is a link to my website. Like this: Like Loading... MakerSpaces. Capture the Learning: Crafting the Maker Mindset. You've heard some good stuff about the maker movement such as how making helps students learn through embodied cognition, creates a mindset that's empowering, and builds creative confidence. You're interested in crafting some maker lessons but don't know where to start or how to do something that works in your classroom. Or perhaps you're worried that you don't have time to do a long, involved project. How do you still teach the Common Core or cover the required curriculum? These simple steps will get you started.

Teaching Creativity? First, identify the content you need to teach. Second, think about the skills that you want students to use and practice. Third, think about restrictions or limitations for the project. Fourth, craft a main question, the simpler the better. The Power of Design Thinking Capture the learning. Grading creative projects can be difficult, so create a rubric that includes students' process. Showcase the projects. Understanding vs. So should students make things? What's the Maker Movement and Why Should I Care? If something is worth doing, it's worth skipping lunch for. That may not be the official motto of Tracy Rudzitis's students at The Computer School in New York City, but it might as well be.

On any given day, 50 of the sixth through eighth graders gather during lunchtime in the school's "Maker Space" to design their own video games, build robots, mix squishy circuit dough on a hot plate, or sew a wearable computer. Rudzitis is the digital media teacher at M.S. 245, The Computer School. When it's not lunchtime, she teaches programming, information literacy, and design to the 350-plus middle school students.

While her lunchtime crew started informally, the growing maker movement has certainly helped attract more students, and push those already interested to take on more elaborate projects. She says her experiences constantly remind her that children are capable of powerful ideas. The same type of excitement happens in Jim Tiffin's—classes at The Harley School in Rochester, New York. 7 Hands-On Projects That Use 3D Printers -- THE Journal. 3D Printers | Feature 7 Hands-On Projects That Use 3D Printers By David D Thornburg10/08/14 3D printing dates to the 1990s. The earliest 3D printers were designed for rapid prototyping for industry. The big change happened around 2008, when the RepRap project resulted in open-source designs that allowed anyone to build their own self-replicating 3D printer.

There are two kinds of 3D printers: those that heat plastic filament and push it through an extrusion nozzle to build a design layer by layer, and a less popular type that uses a laser beam to harden a liquid resin to create the layers of the finished object. There are currently more than 100 3D printers on the market that might be appropriate for educational uses. Teaching in 3D The fact is that I'd be hard-pressed to think of an academic subject that can't be enhanced by the use of 3D printers. Literature: Suppose a student reads a book. For example, a tabletop can be tiled (covered with no gaps) by triangles, squares and hexagons. Learning by Making. The maker movement — think of it as “smart DIY,” a high- and low-tech approach to tinkering that turns users into inventors — is spurring excitement about the power of ingenuity in fields as disparate as robotics and design and agriculture.

(Even the White House has hosted a Maker Faire.) Increasingly, the movement’s appeal is spreading among educators, who see its celebration of hands-on creativity and empowered problem solving as a doorway to a rich array of learning possibilities. What can students gain from an approach to education that focuses on so-called maker experiences?

How can a maker-centered approach to learning — one that incorporates building, crafting, or engineering in digital or physical space — help develop students’ sense of competence or agency? AbD is fostering new kinds of DIY (or, more accurately, DIT — “do it together”) learning in real classroom settings. Agency by Design: In Action Stay Tuned Additional resources.