Author: Susan Klimczak

South End Technology Center @ Tent City, United States - I am the education organizer of Boston's Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn program, passionate about engaging our youth in the creative possibilities of engineering and technology. Every day I witness the genius of our teenage youth as teachers, makers, and catalyzers of cultural change in our communities. I also love my bicycle and baking pies.

“Push Me!” Teaching Paper Electronics to a Crowd with a Switch Sampler

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 »

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 »

“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 »

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 »