About 11 years ago I founded the first Repair Café in a German high school near Dusseldorf where we started to fix devices, repair chairs, and made things work again which were broken, abandoned, or out of function. The kids volunteered to stay after school and learned to fix things. Once, a 12-year-old boy from… Read more »
Author: Mathias Wunderlich
Mathias Wunderlich is a teacher at the Freie Aktive Schule Wuelfrath (FASW) in Germany near Duesseldorf. This is a private school with deep roots in the pedagogy of Maria Montessori and Rebeca & Mauricio Wild. The school offers students the opportunity to work, to invent, to tinker whenever they want. It has a concept which gives students a maximum of freedom of their choice what they want to learn, when, with which classmates, in which chronology. Mathias runs a dedicated makerspace there, with all kind of tools and material for crafting, making, electronics etc. He initiated the first Repair Café in a German school which takes place regularly once per month and is open to the public. With different groups of students the school periodically takes part in Maker Faires, science nights, competitions etc.
Weekend Maker Camp under Covid-19 conditions
Weekend Maker Camp a.k.a. 48 Hour Tinkering-Monastery Instead of writing a boring blog post, I asked a friend of mine to ask me some questions about my latest activities as a maker educator. Claire: How did you come up with the idea of a 48 Hour Makercamp? Mathias: We have a weekend and the weekend… Read more »
Papert’s 8 Big Ideas Translated into German by Students
Instead of just writing about Papert’s 8 big ideas, I thought it could be a good opportunity for my students in school to translate Papert’s ideas into their own language. A few students from my school are “residents” of the makerspace. They don’t like anything they think of as “schooley”, especially reading, writing, and English,… Read more »
Mission “A”
“Steam” for a well-educated German speaking science teacher is an invisible form of water which is around us all of the time but nobody takes notice of. “STEAM” is the same thing in a capital letter headline – any drunk graphic designer may have thought this would be funny like Comic Sans. Just a few… Read more »