Presentation Title: Maker Ed: The work and the impact

Presentation Description: The maker education movement carries with it the momentum and promise to transform education — and ultimately, how we view learning and teaching altogether. It brings together elements of various educational pedagogies and practices, historical movements, and current trends, engaging all youth in interdisciplinary, hands-on learning experiences that are reflective and purposeful. Maker Ed, a non-profit organization that works with educators, organizations, and communities nationwide, help to train, support, and connect educator’s efforts to integrate making into their educational approaches and make a deep, long-lasting impact on their youth.

Link to presentation’s supporting documents:
http://makered.org/makerspaces

Additional Information:
makered.org/resources
makered.org/makercorps

Presentation Description: The Tinkering Studio is a public space within the Exploratorium in San Francisco, where we design opportunities for people to “think with their hands” in order to construct meaning and understanding through STEM-rich learning experiences. In this talk, I’ll touch on some of the underlying ideas behind this work and hopefully show why a constructionist theory of learning is ideally suited to maker-centered education.

Link to presentation’s supporting documents:
http://tinkering.exploratorium.edu/coursera

Additional Information:
http://tinkering.exploratorium.edu/blog

Presentation Description: If we truly believe that teachers teach how they are taught, then our professional learning should look radically different than most inservices and workshops currently do. This presentation outlines one approach to helping teachers learn and experience what a MakerSpace might look like inside either a STEAM classroom or as a club outside the regular school day.

At our STEAMmaker camp, students and teachers become true learners, as they experience a hands-on learning environment unlike their traditional school classroom. Here, they get to think, ideate, prototype, test, and publish answers to challenges that are issued to them, all while working on self-designed challenges. Students and teachers work in teams as parallel learners to create solutions to various challenges, all while fostering a sense of independence and joy inside collaborative learning. And as a result, both students and teachers develop understanding and leadership to be a core member of a STEAMmaker movement in their own schools/districts, should they choose to take summer camp back home!

If you want students and teachers to learn how to be risk-takers, to be hands-on tinkerers, to be active builders and growers, then you want a STEAMmaker Camp.