Fellow
This article has colaboration of Pietro Domingues.
There are many ways to make electronics fast and safely (using conductive inks, kits with magnetic contacts, breadboards, etc). However, the soldering method is still indispensable to definitive PCB assembles and to low cost solutions.
Fellow
What do these words mean? How are they interpreted by teachers, by administrators, by students, by politicians?
In the past few months I have been a part of a number of discussions surrounding this question. The conversations are genuine and in most cases have the best interests of students and learning in mind. There is one thing that I have noticed, there can be a wide range of perspectives and responses to these questions.
Fellow
Twice a week I coach an Odyssey of the Mind team. All week I collect scraps, recyclables and cast away objects to bring to meetings for them to peruse. The process of searching through these materials inspires the gadgets they create, the props they invent, and costumes they fashion. Through the practice of re-purposing and upcycling, the team engineers through both limits and possibilities. The raw material is limited; what they would normally use to solve a problem is not always available.
Fellow
It may be snowing right now but that doesn’t mean that my kids are idle by any means…. We’ve only got 6 weeks left until we launch a balloon to space! Yup, that’s right its Global Space Balloon Challenge time! If you haven’t heard about this great project, or just want to know more then read on.
Global Space Balloon Challenge is in its second year this year and has gained significant traction since last time this year. I think part of the reason is that they have made it really easy to get started with an amazing set of resources on their main site. There are also great prizes this year like, Best Photo, Best Experiment, Best Charity and on and on.
Fellow
(This blog post was written in Feb 2015. Thanks to Sylvia Martinez for editing this blog post.)
Last week, I got a chance to visit the Bourn Idea Lab, a FabLab@School at Castilleja School in Palo Alto. I spent one and a half hours observing interactions in a maker class for my study about learning environment and interaction in maker lab. I'd like to share my learning experience in this post about how impressed I was by the wonderful learning environment in the school's maker lab. Thank you Angi Chau and Heather Pang for supporting my visit.
Fellow
Recently I was tasked (or really I tasked myself) with creating a writeup of our program at our (Lighthouse Creativity Lab) website. When I heard there were questions about embedding making and a maker mindset into standards based curriculum, I thought I would share my writeup here. In addtion to this overview, we have narratives of ongoing projects at our site. As a public charter school, we are working to integrate making into a CCSS and NGSS aligned curriculum and we are working with other schools in the area to do the same.
Fellow
Our task is to prepare children socially, emotionally, intellectually and morally to further the advancement of our culture: a righteous and heroic task! Countries such as the oft-cited Finland (there are three different links here), and methods such as the Montessori Method (only one link) involve would-be teachers in a rigorous selection and training process. The teacher must be a perfect observer, attuned to the interests of the student and their developmental needs, ready to deliver the gift of an appropriate learning prompt to each student or student group. The teacher must also be a skilled documentarian, documenting and assisting the child to self-document the learning process. Sufficiently thorough documentation of learning in process can be one way to lead away from direct assessment and avoid a bias toward focusing on the product or artifact.
Fellow
At Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, I worked with 6 groups this year from primary school to high school, each one with a different project. Consequently a lot of prototypes are hanging around the fabLAB. In order to keep the lab not too messy I decided to have each group fabricate stackable boxes by modifying a design from thingiverse.
Institution
The 2014/2015 FabLearn Fellows cohort is a diverse group of 18 educators and makers. They represent eight states and five countries, and work with a wide range of ages at schools, museums, universities and non-profits. Throughout the course of the year, they will develop curriculum and resources, as well as contribute to current research projects. Their blogs represent their diverse experience and interests in creating better educational oportunities for all.
Fellow
One of the things I like about letting students decide what they need to make for their projects is how much learning takes place between the moment they say "I want to make a model of the Taj Mahal to show how the architecture reflects the way Shah Jahan wanted to memorialize his wife" and the finished project. For me, as a teacher, that is when a great deal of learning takes place.