Role-playing Games as Petri Dish for Whimsical Tinkering “I like to think of play as the art of world-making, and that play is about inventing invented realities. It is about creating a world, physical or virtual, inhabiting that world, and then eventually becoming inhabited by it.” – Edith Ackermann, “Playful Inventions and Explorations: What’s to be… Read more »
Author: Sam Phillips
Sam Phillips is the Manager and Lead Instructor at MetaMedia, a digital media lab and hang-out space open exclusively to middle-school youth at the McGaw YMCA in Evanston, Illinois, United States. At MetaMedia, he oversees curriculum development across multiple modes of making, including audio and video production, video games, papercraft, circuitry, and digital fabrication. Prior to MetaMedia, Phillips was a video and animation teaching-artist at Street-Level Youth Media and Marwen in Chicago, and taught 6th Grade Writing and Technology at Nashville Prep Charter School. Phillips holds a bachelor’s degree in cinema studies from Oberlin College.
[Meaningful Making] Podcast Episode 2: Making in Younger Classrooms
Meaningful Making Podcast w/ the FabLearn Fellows EPISODE 2: THE MAKING IN YOUNGER CLASSROOMS EDITION Hosts: Angie O’Malley, David Hann, & Sarah Emerson Welcome to Meaningful Making – a brand new podcast brought to you by the FabLearn Fellows where we try to unpack the world of maker education, share constructionist best practices, and illuminate incredible… Read more »
[Meaningful Making] Podcast Episode 1: Design Make Teach
Meaningful Making Podcast w/ the FabLearn Fellows EPISODE 1: THE DESIGN MAKE TEACH EDITION Hosts: Daniel Schermele, Josh Ajima, & Sam Phillips Welcome to Meaningful Making – a brand new podcast brought to you by the FabLearn Fellows where we try to unpack the world of maker education, share constructionist best practices, and illuminate incredible work… Read more »
[Meaningful Making] Podcast Episode 0: Computer As Material
Meaningful Making Podcast w/ the FabLearn Fellows EPISODE 0: THE COMPUTER AS MATERIAL EDITION Hosts: Andrew Carle, Daniel Schermele, & Sam Phillips Welcome to Meaningful Making – a brand new podcast brought to you by the FabLearn Fellows where we try to unpack the world of maker education, share constructionist best practices, and illuminate incredible… Read more »
Meaningful Making: Podcast Workflow.
Over the past two months, the FabLearn Fellows have been quietly working behind the scenes to develop a podcast that we hope will spotlight the work of maker-educators from around the world, share constructionist best practices, and help us connect more meaningfully with each other and all of you. We’re calling it Meaningful Making because we want our… Read more »
New Year’s Resolution: Meaningfully Engaging Families.
Henry Ossawa Tanner’s 1893 painting The Banjo Lesson is one of my favorite depictions of inter-generational learning. So many details from the painting illustrate my vision of what a perfect moment of mentorship looks like: The comfort and trust embodied in the way the boy is perched steadily on his grandfather’s knee. The trance of learning. The flow state. The “hard… Read more »
Touching Gears.
If you’re familiar with FabLearn, you’ve probably read Seymour Papert’s canonical essay “The Gears of my Childhood” where he describes his formative experiences with gears, cobbling together interlocking systems from an erector set and finding pleasure in their rudimentary functions. Gears became a schema through which Papert could access and understand the world around him and provided a comfort that informed his life-long passion for mathematics… Read more »
Diving In.
I never learned to swim. I can vaguely float. I can blow bubbles and tilt my head to breathe. I can wrap my body in a pool noodle and kick mightily until I’ve splashed myself breathless. But I can’t put it all together and swim a casual lap. It’s not for lack of trying. My parents enrolled me… Read more »