One of the most meaningful things that I get to do as a teacher is to watch my students learn. What makes it most exciting and interesting for me is observing this learning through their eyes and their contexts. I have several Flip Cameras located in the classroom long with my Point and Shoot camera and the students will ask me “where is the camera?” “can we use the camera?” “we just did something really cool, can we record it?”

The first big project this fall in the STEAM Lab was the construction of Rube Goldberg machines. Students were grouped in teams of 5, not the optimum size perhaps, but based upon 6 tables and 30 students per class and 11 classes in total. You can imagine the amount of activity and experiences happening during any one moment of the 50 minute class period. Often too much for a single person to be able to observe, comment on, and monitor, as well as explain, assist, find materials for, and prompt groups when they get “stuck”. Having cameras that could be picked up and used by students at any point in the class gave me a window into the student’s work that I might otherwise have missed.

Each project my students participate in has a documentation component. The cameras provide a seamless way for students to document and think about what they are doing. Getting students to document their learning and their exploration of materials, concepts, and ideas can be a difficult task. Using design journals or handouts to encourage students to write and plan is one way to go about it. Planning is an important part of the process, but students (and many times adults) are often impatient and want to just start the project without spending too much time on the “thinking about it first” portion which can take on the characteristics of school that many students have a difficult time with. The sitting still, blank sheet of paper and pencil on the desk, outline of requirements on the board, mind racing with the typical things that occupy a middle school student’s mind, these are all in conflict with each other.

There has to be a space where the planning, thinking, design, making, experimenting, testing, reflection, iteration can exist in harmony and equal passion. The other important detail that must be visible is a way for the teacher to be able to get a glimpse of the thinking and ideas that each student is swirling around in their head as they work through the project. Using video and photography has opened up this space and provided an additional format for students.

Looking through the photographs that the students make while documenting their work has allowed for a different insight into their thinking and their ideas. Working with 6th and 7th graders, the expectation when you give them a reflection or a worksheet, is that the teacher provides the questions, or the prompts, the check off list. The adult in the room has decided what is most worthy of discussion, what learning is to be addressed, what questions should be answered. When I look at the projects through the eyes of my students I discover what they think is important, what they are discovering, what is new and exciting for them. I also get to see the focus and concentration in their approach to the work that is often captured unexpectedly or in spite of the enthusiasm that is also displayed. The cameras are available at any time, and students understand the basic expectations, they are documenting their work, their process, their ideas. Pass the camera on to the next team when you are done, don’t worry about editing or viewing the photos until I get them uploaded on the Google+ photo album.

• Photographs of Rube Goldbergs by students (Google photo album)
• What can happen when the teacher is not looking! (Vimeo video)

Photographs can tell one part of the story, video can tell another. With the addition of a sound track or voiceover, the students can explain their work and speak about the process and what they have discovered. It offers insight into the project, and can also address some of the more formal learning targets that the teacher might have for the students and the project.

Makerspace Project Documentation

The documentation of student work can provide evidence of student learning and understanding. Looking at student work is a process that is worthy of exploration. There are several formal methods or protocols that can be used when looking at student work (see http://www.lasw.org/methods.html for more detail). My interest in having students explain and show their work comes from what I often perceive as a tension between the pre-defined expectations often outlined in the rubrics and “students will be able to…..” messages that are more often written for administrators then for the students.

Half-way into the first year of the STEAM Lab at my school, I am focused on the need to identify methods of measuring student understanding in ways that are embedded and natural to the hands-on, constructivist learning that takes place in the room. I am looking forward to working with several other STEAM and Maker teachers in the NYC education community over the next few months and seeing where our ideas might take us.

I spent the last 3 years, among other things, working as learning environment designer at Laboral Art Center Gijón, Spain. The art center has a fabLAB that is used for artistic production as well as education and research LAB by several public schools in the region.

What I do exactly is to help teachers from primary and high school to integrate digital fabrication, rapid prototyping, physical/creative computing, design, making etc. in the classroom.

During the summer we run a teacher training where the participants explore the lab and its tools  learning some basic fabrication and programming skills. After that every group designs an year long project to be implemented with the students.  Along the school year teachers and students work together in class and at fabLAB realising the projects.

I’d like to share some lessons I learned by co-designing long-term making projects with a lot of teachers. I’ll do it by sharing part of the experience of three of them: Rous, Xose, Macu.

Rous: Keep calm and let the kids make!

Watch the interview HERE

Getting started with making in the classroom can be very hard and confusing. Teachers are usually scared, worried, disoriented. As Rous says, typical reaction at the beginning are: “Oh my God, what am I doing here? How can I structure the work with the students? How can I organise the activity? How the training process will be?” They don’t know how to establish connections between making activities and the curriculum. They start to move in a new environment, with a lot of technology and they feel like they can’t control the situation. I learned that a very important issue is to have a guidance, an emotional, technical, pedagogical, support who make them feel comfortable and help them to be more and more autonomous. For a teacher used to work in a structured way the unstructured making situation  is like a vertigo before the jump. They really want to do it but they are scared. So I think is important they understand that the jump to experiential learning  is safe, good and enjoyable!

Xose: Making means  also to break up with the excessive hierarchization at school

Watch the interview HERE

Introducing making in the classroom allows a change in the hierarchical relationship student/teacher and opens a new space where we can look at students with learning difficulties from a different perspective.

As Xose says “the change of the learning place, the different organization of work, the break up with the excessive hierarchization at school lead to the success”. The success reveals itself in form of a growth of student`s self esteem, personal initiative, self organization  and compromise to a long term project.

Macu: making can spread like a virus and change the way of working of the entire school  

Watch the interview HERE

When a school manager became excited about experiential learning the beneficial effects of making can go beyond the “borders” of the lab and transform a school in a big makerspace. It is happening in a small rural school of a low income region. They don’t have any fablab or expensive tool, but they have the most precious thing of the making toolset: learning through experience and cooperation.

The past few weeks on the FabLearn blog have been really spectacular – interesting, informative, and inspiring!

I was going to do a roundup of posts — but there are just too many, so let’s get some action going on commenting and sharing out. This is a week many educators are off of work, sometimes that means they drop all social media, but for others, it’s a chance to catch up!

Here’s a list of social media:

• Twitter (use the hashtag #fablearn and/or #makered) – tweet about these great posts and retweet (RT) others.
• Facebook – just add the link to your blog and Facebook will pull a graphic and a few lines from the post. Just make sure it’s the actual post URL, not the top level page of the site.
• Facebook groups – there is a FabLearn group and a Fab Education group that anyone can post to. Other groups called I am a Maker (which seems to be mostly teachers posting) and a Makerspaces and the Participatory Library group are places that some posts would find a home.
• Google Plus community for Maker Ed Foundation has a small community and a place for posting

Post your own posts, your comments on other posts, etc.! Don’t worry about posting too much, but maybe stagger things out a bit. One post a day, at different times of day, etc. There is enough good stuff here to keep a lot of conversation going!

And Happy New Year to everyone!

Sylvia

What is Self-Assessment?

The purpose of teacher driven assessment is to measure whether a student is ready to move on to the next topic in a given curriculum. Often this translates to the next chapter of a text book. If the student passes the teacher’s assessment, the next step in her education is given to her in lockstep manner. This approach to learning and assessment, while comfortably quantifiable, unfortunately fails to approach the full spectrum of learning that modern day education has to offer children and adults. Throw MakerEd spaces into the mix, and you have a recipe for a revolution in assessment, beginning with handing the right and responsibility of assessment, over to our students.

Dr. Betty MacDonald of the University of Trinidad and Tobago, and leader in the field of using self-assessment to support individualization, describes self-assessment in the following manner;  “the involvement of students in identifying standards and/or criteria to apply to their work and making judgements about the extent to which they have met these criteria and standards.” When a learner does not utilize the  insight of others more their own critical insight into their progress towards a learning goal, they are using self-assessment. Self-Assessment is any form of assessment that is undertaken by the learner as a first person. Autonomy to diagnosis one’s work (with or without the aid of an expert), can come into play cyclically during a making activity. Documenting that process becomes, by necessity, the responsibility of the learner.

The nuts and bolts of self-assessment? Regardless of how you define it, I have seen in the past three and half years that using self-assessment allows a learner to work towards an ability to:

1. Critique Quality of Work (self and others)

1. 1. Based on principles of design, science, engineering and research

   2. Based on a rubric of pre-selected standards created by students or teacher

   3. Based on peer-feedback and classroom mentoring

2. Diagnose and Describe a Problem/Propose Solutions

   1. Documentation, verbal or written of pass or fail for a given (can be 100% teacher driven or 100% student driven) goal

3. Communicate Competence and Reasoning

   1. Illustrate knowledge of concepts or skills through application (authentic assessments such as pass/fail) or representation (as in a paper test or essay)

   2. Argue for the use of specific materials and design ideas

   3. Mentor others in the use of a tool or technique

Relevance

Need to know how to clean a carburetor, make a souffle or pronounce Dutch words? Students can instantly explore any topic or new skill they are passionate about by browsing YouTube or any other DIY site. Awareness that education, or learning in general will no longer be the proprietary interest of a few elite institutions, Raymond Cirmo of  Cheshire Academy (Connecticut) and Vice President of the Connecticut Science Teachers Association, sums up this inevitable shift from teacher-driven curriculum to student-driven, when he says; “We first need to realize that the students are not in our classroom, we are in their classroom. And the room is not set up for us to teach; it is here for us to be facilitators in the students’ learning.” Combine access with motivation and you have an increasingly self-educated population lead by experts and amateurs alike.

With trends towards more differentiation in education, also termed a “student-centered” approach to learning, the teacher no longer defines, or impedes, what students find relevant or engaging to learn. Gary Stager, of Invent to Learn and Constructing Modern Knowledge, describes his tactic for supporting student learning with the following mantra, “Just get out of the a way!”  A tactic that works well for encouraging a love of learning, but what happens when you are part of a system that gives students grades?

In the more self-directed learning environments of MakerEd, content knowledge is gained as it becomes relevant to a solution for a problem at hand. Not every student learns the same concepts or acquires the same skills. This presents a major problem for assessing a student on a standardized scale. Consider the alternative; teaching content to assess the retention of content, as the Common Core has left many doing.  Assuming you agree, that we are heading in the correct direction in education, you may then wonder; Where does all of this relinquishing of power leave us as teachers? What active role do we take as the champions of our students’ passions and pursuits of purpose?

I believe that MakerEd practitioners and champions will offer the best classroom models to answer the above questions. Witnessing the wonders of MakerEd teaches us to foster an environment of growth and self-actualization by using forms of assessment that challenge our students to critique their work, and the work of their peers. This is where the role of self-assessment begins to shine light.

What We Gain from Self-Assessment

Shifting assessment in the classroom from the hands of the adult educator, to the empowered learner can include the following educational benefits:

1) Assessment Literacy – Students learn how to critique their work and the work of others for quality, growth and even creativity.

2) Communicators who defend a Claim – Students learn to use argument, logic, evidence-based reasoning, and various literacy (including technology) skills to judge and defend a claim about their work. Students practice at making thinking visible.

3) 21 Century Librarians – Our students are growing up in a world where information is increasingly free and accessible to those with internet access. The ability to navigate one’s own learning using the sea of available resources is a vital skill to be cultivated.

4) Participation in Democratic Education – Allowing students to have a say in what they learn, as well as how they share, celebrate and give evidence of growth allows for a more empowered learner.

In summary, using non-traditional forms of assessment to support our students can feel risky and more messy. Keep faith, however, as noted in an article entitled Using self-assessment to support individualized Learning, by Dr. Betty MacDonald, “The process is time consuming, but the dividends are worth far more than the time invested, especially when you consider the long-term benefits of life-long learning.”

Next Up:

The Role and Rigor of Self-Assessment in MakerEd (Part 2): How effective is Self-Assessment?

Works Cited

1. Andrade, Heidi, and Anna Valtcheva. “Promoting Learning and Achievement Through Self-Assessment.” Theory Into Practice 48.1 (2009): 12-19. Print.

2. MacDonald, Betty (2012) “Using Self-Assessment to Support Individualized Learning” Mathematics Teaching. Association of Teachers of Mathematics

3. Smith, Calvin Douglas, Kate Worsfold, Lynda Davies, Ron Fisher, and Ruth Mcphail. “Assessment Literacy and Student Learning: The Case for Explicitly Developing Students ‘assessment Literacy’.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (2011): 1-17.

In the Nairobi Fablab, I have personally seen that hands-on making is life-changing. However it can be difficult to measure impact and as such it is difficult to quantify the successes of the process. But I am particularly curious about the making in the context of the developing world. I feel the impact of the change effected by making is most significantly felt, and needed here. But then how do we ensure that making is exploited to its full potential?

With developing world challenges such as reliable connectivity and off-the-grid access to electricity, there is a tremendous need for ingenuity and. The issue is how to provide making experiences to those brilliant young minds. From my travels around East Africa, I am amazed at the number of small creative and innovative spaces. Africans have clearly seen the need for the local solutions to local problems. And the making scene has become really vibrant in the last few years. The potential and need for African makers is tremendous, and makerspaces are popping up, including schools.

I was very impressed by the Accelerating Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship (AISE) space in Arusha, Tanzania. AISE is a local innovation space where the community is empowered to design and create their own solutions and technologies. It is a space where creative ideas come to life. I spent 2 months working with them earlier this year. Their scope recently expanded to hosting workshops for school children teaching them skills required for making as well as getting them involved in project-based learning.

I believe that the focus on children is so important to improve education and lives around the world, but especially in the developing world. There is a need for similar spaces all over Africa in order to ensure the systemic and sustainable development of Africa.

Two years ago, the first 3D printer arrived in Kenya at the Nairobi FabLab. Since then, the trend has caught on to the point of people owning personal printers. I know the world is years ahead in terms of 3D printing but Africa is full of surprises!

In December 2014 I made a presentation at a conference on Footwear Health Tech in Eindhoven, Netherlands. This was due to ‘Happy Feet’: a project to provide footwear for people with foot deformities. During the conference, 3D printing featured prominently as the value of the custom fit and personalization of shoes has become clear. During my presentation, I mentioned that as a result of my research, I had concluded that it wasn’t yet time for meaningful and sustainable 3D printing in Kenya, especially for what I was trying to do on such a large scale. A woman in the audience challenged me because 3D printing (printers and filament) have become very cheap. I answered that the affordability of the printers was relative and the Kenyan context is a different scene altogether. But she didn’t accept my answer, continuing to ask why it wasn’t affordable. I was surprised by her persistence and this got me thinking of a way of making 3D printing affordable in an African context.

This is not a new quest for me. I have been thinking and trying to answer this very question for a while now because my project relies heavily on 3D printing (plus it’s one of my most favorite tools to be honest). I had thought about how to recycle certain plastic waste materials to extrude plastic filament. From my travels, I saw that there’s already so much going on out there in this field. And I am happy to say that I shall be setting up our own extruder in January next year here in Nairobi.

And then there’s brilliant African ingenuity such as this fellow right here who has built a 3D printer out of waste from a scrap yard. Such stories give me renewed hope in the maker culture in Africa. Our circumstances give us new ways of thinking and I am looking forward to what this amazing continent has to offer. Unique situations call for unique solutions so watch this space in the years to come! I can assure you that you will not be disappointed.

So why not do the same in Kenya? Challenge accepted! I have been in touch with people who are willing to help me set up such an initiative where we will be locally producing 3D printers from recycled e-waste. We will be doing this in parallel with the filament-making industry so the two will support each other. The goal is to alleviate poverty, make 3D printing more reachable and affordable to makers in Kenya as well as hopefully make high quality products that could be sold to the international market. So you can imagine that I have big plans for the year that is to come. So do stay tuned!

I have been involved in many projects during my time at the Fablab in Nairobi and I personally enjoy those that leverage technology for change and development. I am most interested about the space for technology in development because I feel it is in this space that making is most needed. I believe very much in empowering people, primarily the poor, with the necessary knowledge and skills to make them problem solvers. Hailing from a developing country, this has never made more sense to me than it does now. Gone are the days of handouts and donor funds. That technique is clearly not working in the fight against poverty. If you ask me, the approach should be more practical as well as personal. The ‘poor’ should be taught how to solve their own problems and supported through this process rather than throwing money at them. And this is where making comes in; be it high- or low-tech type of making. I look up to Amy Smith, founder of MIT’s D-lab, which is building a global network of innovators to design and disseminate technologies that meaningfully improve the lives of people living in poverty. She said, “We need to think of poor people not as vulnerable, but as capable. We have to think of it not as a billion mouths to feed, but two billions hands to engage.”

With that being said, I would like to talk about a personal project of mine that I have been working for the past two years called ‘Happy Feet’. It involves leveraging 3D printing to fight jiggers that cause foot deformities and sometimes death.

The jigger is a small flea measuring about 1mm in size that is found in dirty environments. It feeds on the flesh and blood of its warm-blooded hosts. The female jigger buries itself in the host’s flesh and lays eggs. This results in a black spot that is typically itchy and painful. Scratching raptures the sac and spreads the infestation. There is stigma against the infection and it affects millions of people, most of whom are children. There have been 265 reported deaths as a result of the jigger menace in Kenya alone.

Besides poor hygiene, the common denominator among the people who are affected by jiggers is abject poverty. They cannot afford water for cleaning as it is not a priority. This contributes greatly to the spread of the jigger menace. Many people cannot afford shoes and the infected cannot fit into conventional shoes. The infected use needles to dig out the jiggers but this option is painful and contributes to the spread of diseases such as HIV/AIDS through the sharing of needles. Shoes are thus necessary in stopping the infection as the jiggers are poor at jumping.

As a solution I propose 3D printed, affordable, customized, and medicated shoes.

This will involve setting up mobile shoe centers, tapping into the networks of Ahadi Kenya Trust (the only organization in Kenya tackling this issue), where people can come in and have their feet scanned and have part of the shoe printed for them. [For more about my research and the shoe project kindly check out this article. The project is still on-going and I am happy to answer any questions]. The magic of making comes in in these shoe centers. This is not just about giving people shoes, but I also see them as spaces where the youth can be taught about basic shoe-making skills. The printed parts of the shoe will be used as a frame around which a classical shoe can be constructed using locally available materials. This is because using 3D printing for the production of these shoes will be expensive as well as very time-consuming. In time, I’m sure these hurdles can be overcome, and I have a few ideas about working around this. Consequently, there will be teaching about 3D printing technology. This encompasses teaching the youth about some basic CAD design principles as well basic computing and designing. But I already have their attention, so why stop there?

From my research, it is evident that the solution to jiggers cannot be just shoes. The crux of the problem is poverty and so something needs to be done to address this directly. I hope to do this through the maker education. With continued support and uptake, I see the shoe centers serving as small-scale/mini Fablabs where the youth are taught skills and introduced to making. With these skills, the youth will certainly have a better chance at life as they not only feel like they are part of the solution, but they are also empowered to do more…much,  much more. The people who are affected by jiggers are typically very poor and so this community space will serve as a second chance at life for them.

I am currently at the proof of concept stage of the project where I will be catering primarily to children as they are the most affected. The teaching will at first be limited to basic computing and design, all the while printing to fight the jiggers. Ideally, the space will be a community-led initiative to ensure the sustainability of the project. Again, if the community feels like they own the solution then they will certainly protect it and ensure its success.

This is an on-going project and although I have come very far, there is still a lot to be done. I will speak more about the project on my next post so be sure to check it out.

I have been a maker educator for over 5 years now, and all the while, I was also a maker learner. I am still learning and that will continue in this amazing experience.

My journey as a maker educator started with a vision and dream that I shared with a great friend and colleague, Juliet Wanyiri, herself a Fablearn Fellow. Juliet and I have known each other since we were about 6 years old in the Kenyan system equivalent of first grade. We went to the same schools and ended up studying engineering together at the University of Nairobi. Our friendship is almost 20 years old now! (Wow! That sounds so scary!) The story is an interesting one, but for now I will stick to my version of the events that lead to my becoming a maker educator.

As Juliet and I progressed through school, we found we were dissatisfied with the theoretical approach to learning in Kenya. We longed for more in terms of quality of education for ourselves and we eventually found ourselves at the Fablab in Nairobi which was ideally located at one of the engineering departments at the University of Nairobi. I still remember my excitement visiting the Fablab for the first time. With my passion for tools and making, I immediately felt right at home.

Juliet and I both share a passion for the community and we always wanted to give back. When our professor and then FabLab coordinator, Kamau Gachigi, introduced us to the PicoCricket kit from MIT’s Media Lab, Juliet and I agreed that we wanted to do something for the community with the skills we were learning. We didn’t have much to give in terms of material things, but what better thing to give than yourself? We decided to share our time, skills and knowledge with others.

Because they were easy to use and learn, the PicoCricket kits seemed like an easy way for us to make our dream a reality. Kamau told us of his plans to have an outreach program at the Fablab where the lab could cater to children interested in making. This immediately stuck with us and we ran with it. After numerous conversations we quickly assembled a team of fellow engineering students and brainstormed about the curriculum that we were going to teach. We focused our teaching around the PicoCricket kit and we had plans of expanding to the GoGo board as well as Scratch. We targeted the less privileged schools as we felt they were most in need (and also because of less bureaucracy).

I feel fortunate to have ended up in an engineering career, given the struggles of the education system in Kenya. But even in my good fortune, I feel our education system could be better. It is very theoretical and focuses a lot on cramming for the sake of passing exams as opposed to learning for the sake of learning. This did not sit well with us as a team and we were determined to do something about it in our own small way. We felt privileged to have had the resources we had that led to us ending up where we were and we wanted to give other children the same (or better) opportunities. And thus the Nairobi Fablab Robotics Outreach Program was born: teaching making to children in a cool and fun way as well as a platform for mentoring the less privileged kids by university students.

The journey itself wasn’t as smooth as it sounds and most of the time we were making it up as we went. We only had the weekends to spare as we were full-time students. So we had to make time to meet up during the weekdays to plan for the sessions on Saturdays. We had many other challenges such as limited resources for supplies and people, all volunteers. But somehow we made it work and ended up scaling up the program to the point that it was taken up and replicated by the biggest telecommunication company in Kenya where it runs to this day. The program grew and changed with time with the curriculum growing in depth and content. Again, I am not doing the story of our struggles and successes any justice. But then again, that is a story for another day. My point is, due to the shared vision of a few individuals and the passion to effect change, our program came to be and consequently I became I maker educator, all the while still a maker learner!