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Ask…. and ye shall answer your own questions

“I hope to apply a strong focus on place-based making and science while here in Atlanta...I also noticed that this year's research panel was very program and project focused, or more practical in nature. This gives me hope that higher education is stepping up to the plate to support and study best practice around making in community programs in ways it has not in the past.”

The above is a reflection from FabLearn 2016 from a prompt given to the FabLearn fellows by our mentor Sylvia Martinez. How would I apply FabLearn lessons to my new role as a K-8 outreach manager at Georgia Tech within the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC)? CEISMC is a self-contained K-12 STEM education research and design hub that has been around for twenty years. Lately, CEISMC has caught the MakerEd bug and I was hired to bring my experience to their partner K-12 schools wishing to start maker programs or makerspaces. I no longer have a makerspace of my own. I am answering my own call to arms post Fablearn. I have shifted from being a teacher/researcher or makerspace coordinator to a curriculum and learning space co-designer, working with multiple educators in multiple disciplines, at multiple public schools, one in an “up and coming” or gentrified neighborhood, and one within an area of concentrated poverty and segregation. This blog is focused on the latter school.

In previous blogs I have written about my students engaging in a spring hard problem each year.  After learning new tools, material science and the basics of patterns and  structures, these projects are a deep design challenge that students engage in for an entire semester in teams of four to five. The level of cooperation that this work involves is intense and can result in a team breaking up and reforming, though this is infrequent. The value of this work is that students are able to tackle problems and design challenges that they would not be able to complete if working alone. This summer, I have had the fortune of spending a week at Beam Camp, a three week session of summer camp in the woods of New Hampshire where ten to seventeen year olds work with graduate level architects and designers to construct massive installations on their one hundred acre campus with two lakes. This blog is a reflection on my time at Beam Camp and the overall value of allowing young learners to work together to build projects that would be impossible for any single person to accomplish alone in only a few weeks.

My kids make stuff.  They’re not geeks, they’re girls.  Sure they know how to make an LED light up, run a laser cutter job, yep.  Yet, even with all of this, their go-to material is still paper, and tape –lots of tape. 

I think we may be making making too complex.

The idea that each individual should learn through direct experience rather than direct instruction is one so obvious to real scientists that the Latin phrase Nullius in Verba, which translates to 'take nobody's word for it' was adopted in 1660 as the official motto of The Royal Society of London. According to The Royal Society's website, the motto was adopted as “an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.” A scientist is a constructivist by nature and profession, but when would constructionism take root in schools?