I was going to call this post ‘Tinkering Teachers’ but that sounded a bit silly. But it’s accurate. This weekend, hundreds of teachers, educators, and administrators will be gathering in San Mateo, CA for Maker Faire, the annual gathering of all things Do-It-Yourself (DIY).
If you’ve been reading Edudemic, you’ve likely seen the crazy growth of the number of teachers who want to disrupt education by taking it into their own hands. Flipped classrooms, flipping Bloom’s taxonomy, etc. Maker Faire is all about rolling up your educational sleeves and figuring out some cool new ways to bring a DIY mindset into the classroom.
Our good friend Steve Hargadon and a few others are doing some hands-on discussions tomorrow (Thursday) on bringing ‘maker’ activities into the classroom. But there’s more to it than that. Maker Faire is seeing an influx of interest from the education world.
I love that.
It signals the permanence of the new mindset where teachers are showing how excited and innovative they’ve become. Thanks to events like Maker Faire, social media tools like Twitter, and an expanding marketplace of education technology tools, it’s a very exciting time to be a tinkering teacher.
Want to learn more about Maker Faire? Check out the schedule of events below or click here to visit the main Maker Faire website.
Education Events At Maker Faire
11:00 This is What Learning Looks Like! (Education Stage)
12:00 Tinkering and Maker Culture: Transforming K-12 Math and Science Education (Education Stage)
12:30 How Play, Innovation and Imagination Support Learning (Education Stage)
1:00 Raspberry Pi: How a $35 Computer Will Give Students an Appetite for STEM (Center Stage)
1:00 Citizen Science and Space Exploration (Education Stage)
1:30 Discover, Create, Advance: Managing Innovation in 21st Century Classrooms (Education Stage)
1:30 I Make, Therefore I Play – the science behind play: how it shapes the brain, encourages discovery and gets you hired at JPL! (Center Stage)
2:00 Democratizing Design: Enabling the Crowd and the Next Generation — includes MENTOR, inspiring the next generation of innovators by introducing students at 1,000 high schools to distributed digital design and programmable manufacturing technologies. (Center Stage)
2:00 Teaching eTextiles to Young Makers (Education Stage)
2:30 Every Child a Maker — announcing an exciting new initiative that seeks to create more opportunities in the community for young people to make (Center Stage)
3:00 Scratch – Programming and Animation for Kids of All Ages (Education Stage)
3:30 Where Are The Black Makers? – kids need mentors, role models, heroes! Diversity in STEM needs help! (Innovation Stage)
3:30 TweetHaus – Public Art, Citizen Science, and Collaboration (Education Stage)
4:00 OpenROV – Open Source Underwater Robots (Education Stage)
4:30 Transformative Learning: Research Evidence for Learning Through Making (Education Stage)
5:00 Adaptive Apps to Spark Creativity and Master Language Learning (Education Stage)
5:30 Mothership HackerMoms: First Women’s Hackerspace. Ever. — come hear about how one hackerspace gets more women making
5:30 Better, Cheaper, Faster! Open Source Books (Education Stage)
6:00 Designing Spaces for Inspired Learning (Education Stage)
6:30 Tinkering and Maker Culture: Transforming K-12 Math and Science Education (Education Stage)
11:00 How to Play with Numbers (Education Stage)
11:30 Code is Literacy: Code Hero, a Game that Teaches How to Make Games (Center Stage)
11:30 Thinking Inside the Box: the Blessing of Constraints (Education Stage)
12:00 Recycled Computers with Open Source OS for Schools and Individuals (Education Stage)
12:30 Lessons Learned from Creating an Innovative School: BrightworksSF (Education Stage)
1:00 Major in Making! (Education Stage)
1:30 Creating a Middle School 3D Prototyping Lab (Education Stage)
1:30 The Story Behind DIY.org – an online community for maker kids (Center Stage)
2:00 The Importance of Being Earnest (in Documenting Your Stuff) (Education Stage)
2:30 Making Professional Makers – Career Tech Ed Instructors Talk Shop – ensuring that “making things” remains a significant part of the American educational curriculum (Innovation Stage)
2:30 20 Tenets of Tinkering: Learning from Kids Who Make (Education Stage)
3:00 littleBits Electronics (Education Stage)
3:30 Tell It Like It Is: Getting Your Lessons into Students Hands (Education Stage)
4:00 Summit Design Studio: Learning for the Next Generation (Education Stage)
4:30 Connecting for Real: How Technology Helps Kids Pursue Their Dreams (Education Stage)
