Hello friends.
What does it mean to have a maker space in your school? First of all,
there is not a standard definition of what a maker space should be.
It can be as simple as a corner of your classroom where students can
tinker, disassemble a broken computer, make a truss bridge with craft
sticks, or just experiment with some safe chemicals. The whole
premise is to get ideas flowing, to fail and find solutions through
trial and error, to answer the question what if? Or, it can be a
dedicated room where there are many high tech machines that can
create almost anything you need or want. The two primary factors are
cost and space. You can make it what you want based on funding and
space and your own comfort zone. The important thing is to get
students tinkering, creating, being curious and making connections to
real life….authentic learning. Just do it!
Take the first step. Get
out of your rut, step into a world where you learn along with your
students.
Your students will love the experience and will benefit in
ways that you couldn’t imagine.
Once I challenged my students to
design a cardboard and duct tape boat that could hold two of them.
The finished boat could have only one layer of water-proofing on the
exterior. This simple challenge excited them so much that they were
doing research on designs, building prototypes and discussing the
best way to build their yachts. Of course, some just dove in and
started building without any idea of how to do it, but isn’t that
what it is all about?
Learning by doing, failing, trying again, and
finally reaching success.
Too often, as teachers we want students to
follow our guidelines because we are the “experts”, and for
purposes of efficiency we can save time. But by making things easier
for our students we are missing an important piece in the learning
puzzle. Two key ideas, choice and trial and error, are critical to
creativity and learning.
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