Developing a Maker Program in schools

  After a bit of a hiatus from this blog, I'm back! I recently had a baby so she's taken up the majority of the time these days... Anyway, back to tech stuff. One exciting initiative I've started at our school is creating a Maker Program in ES. It's been an incredible journey so far and by no means, do I feel like we are there but we are well on our way.

I recently co-led a "Making" preconference in November as our school hosted the Learning2africa conference. This workshop took a ton of work but thought it went very well and we had almost 25 participants. For those of you interested, here's a link to the powerpoint. After some theory, we had a group challenge where participants had to create a device that would hover in a homemade wind tunnel and used the Design Cycle to create their devices. 

We also provided a number of breakout sessions on 3D printing, robotics, programming and arduinos. This workshop was a nice way to share where we were as a school in terms of our Maker program journey but also to network with other colleagues from around the world.

Things have actually progressed quite a bit since this. A couple of updates:

• Now have integrated design thinking Maker projects into 3 grade level units (Sound and Light, Forces and a KG Toys unit) and plans for several more

• Got budget approval to completely redesign new innovative Maker Space room (photos to come...)

• Leading staff PD workshops on Design Thinking and Maker spaces

• Created a Grade 5 Tech Crew group which have been teaching other grade levels: 3D printing, robotics, circuit creation

• Planned a Maker Family Saturday for later this year

• Ordered tons of new resources to expand the program!

So what does design thinking look like in ES? Here's a video I made from last year:  

Design Thinking in ES from AISJ on Vimeo.