1. Teaching to Teach: Inventing and Making in the Classroom
Dr. Gerald Ardito
Pace University, New York

2. Or What Do We Do in the Second Hour?

3. Research Questions
What happens when teachers are immersed in inventing and making technologies?
Do they reconceptualize themselves as teachers?
Does Constructionism work as a pedagogy for teacher education?

4. Conceptual Framework Constructionism (Papert)
Situated Constructionism (Resnick and Kafai)
Design Based Learning (Schunn)

5. Some Background
Considerable Experience with Technology-Rich Initiatives with Elementary and Middle School Students
Managed a One Laptop Per Child deployment for 5th grade teachers and students
Taught Scratch and Python to 7th and 8th graders
Inventing and taught curriculum that incorporated Arduino projects

6. Working with Students

7. "I invented Physics for myself"
The Ripple
"I invented Physics for myself"

8. Working with Teachers

9. What we did
We created a graduate course for teachers called "Inventing and Making in the Classroom.
The course was taught in an immersive and Constructionist manner.
The teachers learned Scratch, LEGO Mindstorms, MIT App Inventor, Arduino
They developed projects for use with students.

13. "I invented Physics for myself"
The Ripple
"I invented Physics for myself"

14. What We Learned "The Ripple" applies to both students and teachers
Learning by building (Constructionism) is a powerful development for teacher education

15. Next Steps
Deepening the "Inventing and Making" curriculum to include game design and more computer programming
Developing a summer program that will have a STEM summer camp for kids in parallel with PD for teachers

16. Thank you
@geraldardito