Boston’s Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn is a 16-year-old maker program where annually 36 teens of color to learn, build and then teach 6 different technology, coding, and engineering modules. Each year our youth teachers engage 700+ children at 30+ community organizations with constructionism-based activities at free 4-week summer STEAM camps. This blog post offers… Read more »
Author: Susan Klimczak
seyMour’s puBlic enTities, eDith’s maKe-ing conVersation & DeSign ReViews
“Learning … happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity.” Seymour Papert “Papert is interested in how learners engage in a conversation with [their own or other people’s] artifacts, and how these conversations boost self-directed learning, and ultimately facilitate the construction of new knowledge.” Edith Ackermann… Read more »
LogoEditor! An Online Text Editor for the LogoTurtle Robot with James Salvatore
For the past several years, many of us in the maker education community have been working on developing a new LogoTurtle Robot (with Josh Burker and Erik Nauman leading the way) to honor Seymour Papert. “Logo Turtle with Seymour Papert Lego MiniFig” kindness of Christopher Sweeney A frustrating issue with coding in a classroom or… Read more »
Connecting Children around the World to Explore Emotions through the Emosilla “Emotions Chair”
Ilaria La Manna is an extraordinary children’s educator and director of Fab Lab Argentina, who works with FabLat, an organization that connects children and educators learning and making all over Latin America. She is in Boston taking some courses and generously offered to connect our Fab Lab to a network of Fab Labs doing an… Read more »
“I saved the world…multiple times!”: the powerful impact of youth teaching younger children and their peers STEAM-related activities
This is a guest blogpost by our talented Tufts University Tisch Summer Fellow, Michelle Nguyen, who conducted research with Boston’s Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn program. Annually, our teen youth teachers teach 700+ children at over 25 community organizations. We have high expectations that our youth always exceed. As our program name suggests, we… Read more »
Making the world of maker education work for everyone: Listening to what youth say
I’ve been an education organizer for Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn for a dozen years. Many of our youth have moved on to college and beyond and sometimes I lose track of them. So, late one night I decided to google “Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn” to see what came up. To my… Read more »
Sweet Tweets: Remixing the Electric Cuff Activity
As a maker-educator, I love Twitter and have many Twitter maker friends who inspire my practice. Recently, my Twitter friend @joshburker (who recently published a rockin’ maker guide you definitely want to buy!) did a light-up electric cuff soft circuit project with his senior citizen technology group at the library. This past summer, we made… Read more »
Toward Making Change: Beyond #BlackLivesMatter (Three: Using Design-Thinking, Collaboration & Hip Hop Culture to Plan Activities)
This is the third of a series of posts documenting the progression of a collaborative project at the South End Technology Center @ Tent City supported by the Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean’s Equity Project. The goal was to create a safe and creative space for high school and college youth to explore their… Read more »
“Technological Disobedience” in Cuba and informal making education
The FabLearn Fellows have been talking a lot about decentering the history and definition of making, makers and maker education. I ran across this video on “Technological Disobedience” in Cuba that sparked my imagination. The description says: In 1991, Cuba’s economy began to implode. “The Special Period in the Time of Peace” was the government’s… Read more »
“Why I am not a Maker” by Debbie Chachra: Toward problematizing what it means to be a “Maker”
I really liked this article “Why I am not a Maker” by Debbie Chachra from our own Olin College outside Boston, which is doing the most difficult and amazing work of transforming engineering education. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/why-i-am-not-a-mak… I added some comments to the article that I paraphrase here: I have been the education organizer for Learn 2… Read more »