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Maker Movement and Culture

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Joshua Glenn: Unbored: The Power of 'Making' in the Classroom. The sixth graders at Marymount School -- an independent Catholic school for girls in Manhattan -- have a problem they need to solve.

Joshua Glenn: Unbored: The Power of 'Making' in the Classroom

The American Dental Association recommends that kids brush their teeth for two minutes, twice a day. But the students know that most kids fall well short of that goal. How -- their teachers ask -- can they find a solution to this challenge? The girls open their sketchbooks and doodle possible solutions. One toothbrush plays music. The project takes several weeks and involves more than a few trips to the school's Fab Lab, a state-of-the art digital prototyping and manufacturing facility that Marymount started in 2011 to more thoroughly engage its students in math and science. While there's a lot of laughing in the Fab Lab, the class also comes with its share of frustration as students try their hands at solutions that don't work. Unfortunately, engaged and enlightened tinkering is disappearing from contemporary American childhood. The Maker Education Initiative. The Maker Movement Finds Its Way Into Urban Classrooms. By Kathleen Costanza, Remake Learning A school library might not be the most obvious place to find kids building robots.

The Maker Movement Finds Its Way Into Urban Classrooms

But this year, Miriam Klein, a librarian and English teacher in the Cornell School District outside of Pittsburgh, is planning to use her district’s brand new Hummingbird robotics kits in the classroom to build characters from stories her students read. Using cardboard, pipe cleaners, and whatever else they come up with, along with the equipment in the kit (motors, LED lights, digital sensors), created by Carnegie Mellon’s CREATE lab, the kids will bring their characters to life.

The infectious enthusiasm Klein and hordes of teachers around the country have for hands-on projects echoes that of the maker movement, a growing network of DIY and making enthusiasts building everything from marshmallow cannons to hovercrafts in garages, at Maker Faires, and state-of-the-art makeshops. [RELATED READING: Why We Need to Value Students’ Spatial Creativity]

Dive into the Maker Movement. The Fab Lab at Marymount School, NYC Adam Provost, 2013 Maker Spaces, Fabrication Labs . . . it's been going on for some time now, but it's all the buzz in education these days.

Dive into the Maker Movement

And with good reason. I've been thinking about all this more and more since walking in on a session called "Digital Fabrication in K-12" at Educon this past January. One of the presenters that day, a fellow named Jaymes Dec, said, "I wish every classroom was a Maker Space. " Dec's comment resonated with me that day. That day at Educon, I decided to take a trip, talk with Dec and the see the Fab Lab he helped create at the Marymount School in New York City. Makers at the Marymount School.