21st Century Skills: Creating, Collaborating, Innovating Makerspace At Cunningham Park 21st Century Skills: Creating, Collaborating, Innovating

What is a Makerspace? “Makerspaces provide hands-on, creative ways to encourage students to design, experiment, build and invent as they deeply engage in science, engineering and tinkering.” Jennifer Cooper, Designing a School Makerspace (Edutopia) 1. 1. "Defining Makerspaces: Part 1." Renovated Learning. 2 Apr. 2015. Web. 19 Aug. 2015.

What is a Makerspace? “Makerspaces are collaborative learning environments where people come together to share materials and learn new skills… makerspaces are not necessarily born out of a specific set of materials or spaces, but rather a mindset of community partnership, collaboration, and creation.” Library as incubator project 2. 2. Ibid.

Here is one example of a Makerspace project at CPES Here is one example of a Makerspace project at CPES. The second grade students were studying fairy tales, and the students were given an engineering challenge: work in teams to build a 3 foot tall tower for Rapunzel out of common household materials such as paper towel tubes, tape, etc. After building the tower, the students shared their thinking about the building process. Just to give you a taste of what a makerspace project might look like, here’s a video of 2nd grade’s Rapunzel’s Tower Challenge. They were studying fairytales and we gave them the engineering challenge of building a 3 ft. tower for Rapunzel (show them Rapunzel). Here’s what it looked like and sounded like.

Makerspace activities also will give students the kind of experience that will help them become the learner that FCPS has described in their Portrait of a Graduate. Maker activities require students to communicate with the teacher and peers, to collaborate with their partners. As they plan and build and revise their projects, they must be critical and creative thinkers and in order to accomplish their goals. They will have to be resilient as they experiment and revise their ideas through the experience of failure and frustration – they will need to persevere to achieve their collaborative goal. Makerspace activities also will give students the kind of experience that will help them become the learner that FCPS has described in their Portrait of a Graduate. Maker activities require students to communicate with the teacher and peers, to collaborate with their partners. As they plan and build and revise their projects they must be critical and creative thinkers and in order to accomplish their goals they will have to be resilient as they experiment and revise their ideas through the experience of failure and frustration – they will need to persevere to achieve their collaborative goal.

If you attempted to build a stand for your golf ball, you engaged in an engineering design process. You probably asked yourself a bunch of questions – how were you going to accomplish your goal? How were you going to use the materials provided. You began to visualize or imagine your structure and made a plan about what to do first, second and third. You started building and probably had to make some corrections, changes, adjustments as you worked to improve your structure which led you to ask yourself more questions about the best strategy or approach to achieving your goal and then … well, it is a cycle, isn’t it?

Why makerspace here? Differentiation: Level IV and underachieving students all thrive Multiple Intelligences Iterative – failure leads to revision to success Collaborative Student directed Cross curricular Project Based Learning Aligns with Portrait of a Graduate Honors Teaching with Poverty in Mind Many maker activities can extend our curriculum, and be cross curricular – We can have the children apply their learning about simple machines into building simple machines using the design engineering process. We can have students engage in problem solving real world challenges by asking question, suggesting solutions, and experimenting with materials to apply and revise their ideas. Makerspace activities are aligned with Level IV challenge and also will allow differentiated learning to all our students at all ability and language levels. With our two pilot projects last year – we saw students who struggle with feeling successful in our more traditional academic tasks – invent, innovate and celebrate!   Makerspaces call on all intelligences: spatial, social, kinetic, verbal – you name it.

Technology and Makerspace Most activities will be based on upcycled, recycled materials K’nex Snap Circuits Squishy Circuits Programmable Lego kits Little Bits (magnetic circuit sets) Donations from parents: sandwich bag of Legos, duct table; recyclables As maker takes hold and we find additional funding we will likely add Lego We Do Kits. We are also likely to invest in Makey Makey, which are credit card sized programable computers which will allow students to experiment with programing. We have the makerspace materials we have acquired so far, thanks to a donation from Rotary Club, out for you to take a look at after the meeting today.

Library & Multi-purpose MakerSPACE in Library & Multi-purpose space Large and flexible community spaces Maker activities in the classroom can be extended into library and AAP or Young Scholars instruction Allows AART, Librarian and School Based Technology Specialist to collaborate with classroom teachers Emphasis in 21st Century libraries is on becoming a “Learning Commons, well beyond “book storage” Role models: Camelot ES and Vienna ES For now our Makerspace will be in the library. As public libraries looked to redefine themselves as community collaborative learning spaces, adding a makerspace in partnership with businesses was an outgrowth.   Some maker spaces emphasize technology, from robotics to coding, some emphasis upcycling and recycling. And some offer a range of choices. In the past 3 years school libraries have caught wind of the innovation and approach to learning with kids and the maker movement has been growing at all academic levels. If we visualize the library as a learning commons, rather than a just a warehouse for books, then maker space makes perfect sense.

Sample Projects Kindergarten – create a “sign” (Environmental Print Unit) 1st grade – design a habitat for animal studied 2nd Grade: Rapunzel’s Tower Engineering – tied to fairytale unit 4th Grade: biography project – students made artifacts related to the person studied; how to clean up an oil spill 5th grade/3rd grade – create artifacts that exemplify culture(s) studied or create a new culture 6th grade social studies– inventions to solve problems (inspired by Franklin or when they get to the cotton gin) PATRICIA Most important is that the Makerspace activities are driving by the needs and interests of our students and teachers and support and extend our curriculum. The genius of the Makerspace experience is in the creativity, the problem solving, the collaborating and the experience of experimenting/trial and error and revision – important skills of ALL our students. We did some maker projects with 4th and 2nd grade last year and we have visions for some possibilities for this year as you can see from this slide. These are just ideas. We want students and teachers to be the catalyst for projects that really serve the students.

Great ideas from other schools Play to learn week Mini Makerspaces in classrooms After-school programs: knitting, robotics, coding Changes the whole-school culture We are lucky that other FCPS schools have lead the way and have generated some great ideas and lessons learned.

What we’ve learned from other FCPS implementers Maker is more than STEAM Maker starts out best low tech as everyone gets comfortable with integrating it into curriculum and with the iterative design process and community comes on board Use before/after school maker programming to build interest and establish a Maker culture – we need to staff these with staff or parent volunteers of hire a provider (Roman’s Robots)

Where do Parents come in? Collaboration with us Join the Makerspace Committee Encourage your child to “make” at home Donate supplies: Paper towel rolls, packing materials, cardboard cereal boxes Legos Duct tape Straws Popsicle sticks

Concepts supported by makerspace Content Creation Across Multiple Subject Areas/Interests Practices of Participatory Learning and Play Formal and Informal Communities of Learning Inquiry Tinkering Messy Learning Makerspaces allow for all of the above.