Aaron Vanderwerff's Blog

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.

We still use the banking model of education as our dominant model - with teachers depositing knowledge in a students' mind. Papert asked us to think about who defines what constitutes a discipline, in other words, what is Physics and how is it taught. He posited that we continue to teach (even 30 years later) the same Physics courses that were developed around the technology of paper and pencil which are focused on solving word problems and carrying out labs with already identified answers.