Background

Many argue that grades, especially those based on standardized tests, are limited in the information they provide about a student as a learner. Due to their “snapshot” nature, grades fail to represent a student’s growth over time. In addition, grades tend to be given by a teacher, excluding a student from the assessment process in a manner that can be detrimental to the student’s learning, engagement, willingness to take risks and even self-esteem. The ethical issues of grades aside, summative grades fail to represent the kind of work students do in a Maker Ed. program (STEAM programs in educational settings that employ making or hands on construction). One of the obvious forms of alternative assessment that makers can use to demonstrate competence and growth, is the portfolio.  Below is a summary of what I have learned about portfolios in the arts and engineering fields, as well as my experience using portfolios for a 6th grade science course.

Lessons Learned from the 2014 PbS 6 Portfolio Project

For the past two years I have taught 5th and 6th grade science through the lens of problem solving and making in a course called problem based science (or PbS for short) and maker portfolios, grew naturally out of the need to store and curate work my students were completing in their year long deep dive into a problem. I teach my classes in the iLab for Making, a dedicated digital and analog making space at the Hillbrook School in Los Gatos, Ca. Teaching full-time in iLab allows my students access to tools, technology and materials for the purpose of exploring science, math and engineering in a hands-on and self-directed environment. PbS level 5 consists of a game-based curriculum that emphasizes skill building, self-directed learning and teamwork as students solve problems of ever increasing difficulty.  PbS 6 is a design thinking course that asks students to focus on a real world problem, which they identify in their environment through a series of active research (interviews, observations, and surveys) as well as passive research (essentially a lit review using the internet or library). Due to the highly differentiated nature of the course, tests were no longer an option for assessment, so for the 2013-14 school year my students agreed that if we ditched the tests, they would dutifully document their course work through a series of self-reflections, prototype logs, written argument essays, and evidence of all the passive and active research they completed. Their portfolio became a record of their inventing, as well a record of the content and skills they gained through their course work.

Around mid-year I noticed that the quality of work my students were accumulating in their portfolios would be a great tool that could be used for the high school application process in 8th grade and student led conferences. In effort to move toward this goal, I am piloting a new elective in the fall of 2014 which is problem based science level 7, introduction to entrepreneurialism. Former PbS 6 students can use the elective time to hone their portfolios while working toward the goal of either publishing their ideas and inventions or learning how to tell the story of their problem solving, a step towards crowdsourced funding for their product idea. In this manner, the process focused portfolio of sixth grade will evolve into the more formal or product focused portfolios more common to the professional world.

What is a Portfolio?

In a 1991 paper by F. Leon Paulson et al. called What makes a Portfolio a Portfolio; eight thoughtful guidelines will help educators encourage self-directed learning, portfolios are defined as a “purposeful collection of student work that exhibits the student’s efforts, progress, and achievements in one or more area.”

Paulson and others further suggest guidelines for best practice using portfolios stating, “The collection [of student work] must include student participation in selecting contents, the criteria for selection, the criteria for judging merit, and evidence of student self-reflection.” (Paulson et. al. 1991)

In summary, a portfolio is an analog or digital (also known as electronic or e-portfolios) collection of student work, which has been intentionally selected to either represent the learners capacity for growth or to highlight a student’s best work for public showcase. If the portfolio functions primarily to document the learning experience (as formative assessment), this is called a working or “process” portfolio. If the portfolio contains only a selection of best work for public sharing (summative assessment), this is called a final portfolio. Public sharing of a portfolio can range from peer-assessment activities, to student-led conferences, to applications to high schools and colleges. (Lombardi 2008)

The Evolution of Portfolios

Portfolios originated as a showcase of work by artists, models, photographers as “tangible evidence of accomplishments and skills that must be updated as a person changes and grows” (Tierney et al 1991). As such, portfolios have been more synonymous with evidence of competency and creativity in ways that tests scores have failed.  Outside of art and design schools, learning portfolios experienced an increase in popularity beginnoing in the 1980’s and 1990’s, perhaps as a response to increasing standardized testing in schools. This trend shows up in a surge of articles and academic papers done on the use of learning portfolios in the 1990’s.  In a 1997 Edutopia article, Pittsburg teacher Kathy Howard notes the democratic role of using learning portfolios in a writing classroom. “There is a shift in the power base from teacher to students,” says Howard. “Students start looking at models of good writing and setting their own criteria and standards for good work.” In the 2000’s, as more electronic portfolio companies have came into existence (see a review of e-portfolio’s here), portfolios are playing a greater role in higher education, including undergraduate and postgraduate medical education (Senger 2012).

Even more recently, and seemingly in time with the Maker Movement overall, a push for engineers to have portfolios has also emerged. Engineering students with portfolios “are able to communicate about their past experiences more clearly, regardless of whether the actual portfolio is needed in a given application process. Also, once they’ve created their engineering portfolio they are able to respond to unexpected opportunities of displaying their work,” states Justin Lai, Invention Education Associate with the Lemelson-MIT program and prior researcher for MIT’s Ideation Lab.

Dale Dougherty and MIT made news when they announced in 2013 that MIT would be accepting maker portfolios as part of their undergraduate admissions process. On the MIT admissions website a maker portfolio is described as “a description of one project completed outside of school, internships, work, or extracurricular activities [which demonstrate] how you learn, create, and problem-solve in an unstructured environment.” Examples of projects listed that would qualify for a maker portfolio include “new origami designs, a chainmail suit, a potato cannon, a knitted fractal, or a computer program/app.” According to MIT admissions gurus, the point of introducing maker portfolios was to give applying students the platform to share what they are passionate about outside of school, to demonstrate a capacity for self-directed learning and competency in areas of fabrication seen desirable by engineering schools, all aspects of a student which SAT scores and essays fail to reveal. It will be interesting to see how many other elite universities follow suit in their own admissions policies in the coming years as “making” becomes a national household term and educational organizations in support of Maker Ed. programs push for evidence of good portfolio use.

One such organization is the Maker Education Initiative, the non-profit off shoot of Make Media (of the famed Maker Faire and Make Magazine). In 2013 the Maker Ed research team began their own nation-wide research project into maker portfolios. This project is called the Open Portfolio Project, or OPP for short.  According to the MakerEd.org site “Portfolios will allow for informal and formal education environments to document students’ accomplishments, allowing for more organizations to make a case for the value of making and giving opportunities to students to learn through making.” The OPP will unfold in three phases says Stephanie Chang, director of Youth Engagement at Maker Ed who is overseeing the implementation of the project. Phase one was a complete literature review of portfolios in education to be published on their website. Phase two includes visits to schools and informal making programs currently using maker portfolios with the goal of “develop(ing) a common set of practices for portfolio creation, reflection, sharing, assessment, and technology solutions to create an open, decentralized, and distributed lifetime portfolio system for makers.” Phase three will be a written playbook on maker portfolios to be published by early 2015. Keep checking the MakerEd.org website for their findings.

A Case for Portfolios

In a review of alternative assessments done by Jenna-Lynn Senger in 2012, portfolios are critiqued for their “highly personalized nature.” Lack of objectivity presents a large problem for those seeking assessment that is easy to use and follows a one-size fits all model.  Portfolios also take time to construct and evaluate. Measures to justify the time that portfolios require versus grading tests are difficult to find and this lack of evidence “has prevented a more widespread use of this valuable tool,” notes Senger (Senger 2012). Further concerns about portfolio use raised by a study done in 1992 include storage and access for students.

Assuming time, storage and a focus on formative versus summative assessment are not your greatest barriers, portfolios are valuable assessment tools on several levels. For starters, portfolios are a constructivist activity in and of themselves which teach students “assessment literacy.” As the student curates their own growth, they become active judges of what quality is. Assessment is embedded in the creation of the portfolio, as students select projects, writing, etc. to highlight. Unlike grades, portfolios “permit instruction and assessment to be woven together in a way that more traditional approaches do not” (Paulson 1991).

Secondly, involving students in the assessment of their own work allows students to feel in control of evaluating how well they have met a learning goal and what might be needed to learn next (Valencia 1990). Having students actively construct their own portfolio, as well as assess their own work for placement into a portfolio, engages a student in ways that are empowering and educational.

Another feature to the portfolio is that they require a real audience. Whether the audience consists of parents at a student-led conference, peers during a peer critique session, a high school admissions team or potential crowd-sourced investors, portfolios leverage a student’s talents in a manner that is more conducive to storytelling than a test. Portfolios provide a powerful tool for students to communicate with others about their work. A portfolio is a set of artifacts that a student can refer to when creating narratives about their work, obstacles they had to overcome and evidence of their commitment.

I have my students prepare written narratives to add to their portfolio describing their personal connection to the problem they chose to study for the year. We also discuss the many ways in which my students can share their scientific work after they complete the product testing phase of the year long assignment. I reassure my students that even if they are not strong writers, they still need to access their story telling talents when sharing the details of their scientific work. Getting others excited about your work is a major part of working as a real scientist or inventor, states Alan Alda, of the famed M.A.S.H. series, and co-establisher of Stony Brook University’s Center for Communicating Science. In a talk he gave at Stanford entitled, “Helping the Public Get Beyond a Blind Date with Science,” Alda reminds us that the audience we need to be able to communicate with may not be part of the scientifically literate. A push towards narratives and good storytelling is an essential part of getting the public and financial support your ideas and work need.

In summary, portfolios are valuable for a Maker Ed. program because no other form of assessment can chronicle the process of invention, tinkering, researching, self-assessment and making the way a portfolio can. Along with peer-assessments and rubrics, portfolios can be used as a holistic form of authentic assessment in any constructivist educational program with student growth at its center.

Works Sited

1. Alda, Alan. “Helping the Public Get Beyond a Blind Date with Science” Talk given at SLAC on October 25, 2013
2. Dougherty, Dale. “MIT Welcomes Makers with New Maker Portfolio” Make Magazine; August 16th, 2013
3. Edutopia staff, “The Power of Portfolios: A Positive Practice” Edutopia article July 1, 1997
4. Edutopia Video: An Introduction to Comprehensive Assessment Performance-based evaluation is a real-world improvement on the artificial measures of paper-and-pencil testing.
5. Hall, Bruce W., and Cynthia M. Hewitt-Gervais “The application of student portfolios in primary-intermediate and self-contained-multiage team classroom environments: Implications for instruction, learning, and assessment.” Applied Measurement in Education 13.2: (2000) 209-228.
6. Johns, Jerry L., and Peggy Van Leirsburg. “How Professionals View Portfolio Assessment.” Reading Research and Instruction 32.1 (1992): 1-10.
7. Juniewicz, Kit. “Student portfolios with a purpose.” The Clearing House 77.2 (2003): 73-77.
8. Lombardi, Judy. “To Portfolio or not to Portfolio: Helpful or Hyped?.” College teaching 56.1 (2008): 7-10.
9. The New School High School Portfolio Guidelines
10. Paulson, F. Leon, Pearl R. Paulson, and Carol A. Meyer.  “What makes a portfolio a portfolio.”  (1991) Educational leadership 48.5
11. Senger, Jenna-Lynn. “Student Evaluations: Synchronous Tripod of Learning Portfolio Assessment—Self-Assessment, Peer-Assessment, Instructor-Assessment.” Creative Education  (2012) 03.01: 155-63. file:///Users/loaner/Downloads/CE20120100023_59177921.pdf
12. Tierney, Robert J., Mark A. Carter, and Laura E. Desai. Portfolio Assessment in the Reading-writing Classroom. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon, 1991.
13. Valencia, Sheila. “Assessment: A Portfolio Approach to Classroom Reading Assessment: The Whys, Whats, and Hows.” The reading teacher (1990): 338-340.
14. Wendell, Dr. Dawn. “When Makers Apply to College” Film of talk at Maker Faire Bay Area May 2013

I am still reflecting on the many wonderful exeperinces at CMK, but I thought I would post a photo: 6 of us in the same room!

The Rapid Growth of “Maker Education” Programs

According to Google Trends (see photo), a new term came into existence and quickly became synonymous with progressive education and a resurgence of STEAM education in America. That term is maker education, or makered for short, and can be seen in the graph as “born” according to google searches, around September of 2004. Although the exact number of makered programs is not currently known, schools that employ a progressive pedagogy (insert the word innovative for those working in the 21st century) or schools that make claims regarding the importance of differentiation, constructivism or experiential learning have built or are building makered programs. At first these programs seemed to be dependent on having state of the art Maker Spaces or FabLabs and high-tech tools, as most were found in well-funded private schools. That picture has changed rapidly in the past ten years since the makered movement has gained popularity, however. More and more public/charter schools and nonprofit programs are building programs for the average American child, that rival many private school programs. In fact, programs with limited budgets and space have reminded us that scarcity or “disability,” are invaluable teachers in any good maker culture, as they breed creativity and self-reliance. Many of the makered programs serving lower income communities have access to mentors who never stopped working with their hands, even when it fell out of status in a consumer driven America in the 1980’s (Curtis 2002). While lower income mentors may not know Python or what an Arduino is, they are skilled carpenters, mechanics, seamstresses, cooks and know what it means to be resourceful.

As with any progressive education discourse that seeks to reform the current education system in America, maker programs serving public schools are at the heart of this movement. Despite hope driven by the first ever White House Maker Faire and President Obama’s declaration of June 17th as the National Day of Making, most public schools still lack access to project or problem based programs. Those working in a makered program, know this kind of work/learning is good for kids, as well as communities and have the energy to fight to keep their programs alive. To support these teachers and to keep makered programs sustainable, i.e. not let them suffer the fate of previous progressive education movements labeled as lacking rigor, we need to be thinking about assessment and we need to be thinking about the following kinds of assessment:

• Assessments used by students for real learning
• Assessments used by high schools and colleges for enrollment decisions
• Assessments used by a community norm system to establish authority or job readiness (badge or certification system)
• Assessments used to inform the efficacy of a maker program (research)

Defining Assessment and Feedback

Discussing assessment and feedback begins with having a conversation about learning in general. Whether an infant, an adult, or a Jack Russell terrier, learning happens every day and in a rich array of ways. Merriam Webster defines learning as “the activity or process of gaining knowledge or skill by studying, practicing, being taught, or experiencing something.” Albert Einstein described learning as “when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.”

Whether you take the more “traditional school” description offered by Merriam Webster, or the more blissful picture painted by Einstein, learning is a process. It is a process that can be intentional, as when we make a conscious effort to learn Mandarin, or it can be unintended, such as when “mistakes” take us down new and unexpected paths of discovery. For the purpose of this introduction, I will refer only to intentional learning, or events when the learner has a defined learning goal.

While learning is happening, assessment is the cognitive processing of outcomes in an attempt to reach a goal. Assessment is at first a snapshot to determine success or failure, then more deeply, a survey of the factors that led to that success or failure (if done methodically through documentation, this is science). Feedback regarding an action is strongly tied to the physical environment as it reflects the result of the learner’s action. Feedback is observed, and it is also felt by the learner.  Shame, pride, excitement, shock, etc., about the outcome (pass or fail) of actions drives the motivation to act again, and again, learning through iteration.

Adapted from various learning models, including the Kolb model, the diagram below shows the growth pattern a learner follows when seeking to learn, with an intended goal in mind (Kolb and Fry 1975). The goal may be to walk, make a souffle, or pronounce a glottal stop. If the goal is reached, we call that a pass. If the goal is not reached, that can be called a fail. After the action takes place, the learner processes the outcome or consequences of their actions through two filters; their cognitive self and their emotional self. The cognitive self seeks to diagnose the reason for the failure or the success (note: diagnosing failure for avoidance, especially if pain was involved, can be easier than diagnosing a success for repetition). The emotional self fills a vital role at this point. Classroom teachers call this emotional element of learning engagement or motivation. Studies in behavior and neuroscience have shown that emotional responses to success and failures, as long as a failure does not result in death, are key evolutionary tools driving learning (Arias-Carrión, Óscar; Pöppel, Ernst).

When failure is tied to a student’s actions and they are the only one around to witness that failure (privacy to fail), learning occurs naturally and even blissfully. Learners must experience both aspects of assessment, the cognitive, as well as the emotional, to move forward with intention, purpose and passion towards their learning goal.  If success comes too easily, a learner may give up on a task out of boredom. If the task proves too frustrating, the learner may abandon their learning goal, adopt a closed mindset and label themselves as a failure. Finding the perfect balance, a term referred to by some as “funstration” and others as the Zone of Proximal Development, is key.

Student or Teacher Driven Learning and Assessment

When a teacher is handed the responsibility for building the curriculum that his students will be learning from September through June, this is considered a 100% teacher driven learning environment. Often this style of education has pre-set assessment tools made well in advance of their need, in the form of a test or rubric. In contrast, student driven learning would entail students having a degree of choice in the content they will study, the skills they will be building or the assessment used to illustrate their learning.  Some combination of teacher and student centered learning is more likely the typical experience, but there are clear differences seen in public versus private school education settings.

In a traditional academic setting the teacher functions as the dark orange square in the above diagram (the cognitive processing of a success or failure). As such, the teacher is entrusted with the wisdom, expertise and fairness to assess each student’s level of and potential for learning, at least in one discipline. When the learner is removed from the critical assessment process in this way, they are left with how they feel about a success or failure, but are not encouraged to take part in the empowering aspect of constructing the causal relationships between their actions and their successes or failures. Removing the cognitive from the emotional, for both learner and teacher, creates an imbalance that gives assessment in a rote learning environment a bad name.

“[Making] is intrinsic, whereas a lot of traditional, formal school is motivated by extrinsic measures, such as grades. Shifting that control from the teacher or the expert to the participant to the non-expert, the student, that’s the real big difference here.”

-Dale Dougherty

In a maker classroom, learning is inherently experiential and can be very student driven; assessment and feedback needs to look different than a paper test to accurately document and encourage learning. Regardless of how you feel about standardized testing, making seems to be immune to it for the time being (one reason some schools skip the assessment piece and still bill making as an enrichment program). Encouragingly, the lack of any obvious right answers about how to measure and gauge success and failure in a maker classroom, as well as the ambiguity about how making in education fits into the common standards or college readiness debate, has not stopped schools from marching forward in creating their own maker programs.

Qualitative versus Quantitative Assessment and Feedback

Grades are quantitative, discrete numbers, asked to be a standard language of achievement. Grades are by definition summative, or a non-flexible snapshot of what a student knows and does not know at any point in time. Due to the nature of these discrete, universal numbers they are used to rank children locally (within their classroom or community), as well as globally, and have enjoyed the status of proof of rigor. Whether you are a 10 year old in Santa Cruz, California, or a 10 year-old in Nairobi, an A in math is supposed to mean something. In contrast, formative assessment is a vital element in the process of learning and is best left to qualitative tools; such as oral feedback from peers and adults, narratives and self-assessments. Unfortunately, formative assessments lack the status given to a letter grade.  Although new methods for assessing meaningful work and learning through projects are emerging, take Maker portfolios now accepted at MIT for example, we are still working primarily within a grade-based system.  As a result, any project can be graded using a clear set of concept or skill related goals in the form of a rubric.

In summary, giving a grade based on a paper test to measure achievement in STEAM still fails to compute in a maker education program, and other quantitative assessments may have a lifespan as well. Neuroscience and educational research assures us that qualitative feedback and self-assessment do more for passion based learning then red marks on a test or high scores on standardised tests. The difference translates to mindsets, argues Mariale Hardiman, professor of education at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education and cofounder and director of the university’s Neuro-Education Initiative. “As the research strongly suggests,” states Hardiman, “when students focus on mastery of learning rather than on their performance on tests, they significantly increase their intrinsic motivation for learning.”

Facing Assessment in Public and Private Schools Today

If we look closely at the pedagogical backbone of makered, the lens would clearly reveal experiential learning and student driven projects, which can be more challenging to assess, at its core. That being said, as paid professionals we need to adhere to a few constraints, while we also strive to help kids be their best. Those two main constraints are standardized curriculum, as a result of an industrialized model of education, and current assumptions about college preparation and career readiness.  Below is a breakdown of each, as they relate to assessment in public and private PK-12 schools today.

1) the Common Core – Described by the well-intentioned as “a common set of rigorous national standards (that) will transform American education, prepare students for college and careers, and allow our nation to maintain international competitiveness,“ the Common Core is a set of educational benchmarks in math and literacy designed to be taught, then tested for proficiency by schools. Essentially the Common Core is a management strategy to hold schools accountable for their use of government funding. Resulting test scores on Common Core assessment determine how “well” a school is doing at educating America’s children. In as simple of terms possible, the Common Core ensures that schools with good test scores are given continued funding for a job well done.

I hope we can all agree that a one size fits all model to force accountability in public schools is an Orwellian and inelegant solution to a systemic failure of industrialized education. That said, its the law of the land for most American children. We owe it to those children to disrupt the system with measurable evidence of how using a makered program to teach math and literacy is better than using a one size fits all curriculum, that focuses on testing versus experiential learning.

2) College Prep versus Life Prep – Just as the common core promises to maintain standards in the public school industry, college readiness is the number one claim made by most private schools. After all, any adult life worth having would follow the expected trajectory of college first, then a prosperous career (an assumption worth on average $19,820 a year if your child attends a school within the National Association of Independent Schools). The problem is, college preparatory schools can not guarantee that all of their clients get into top high schools or colleges, only the top performing students will receive those slots, and thus the race begins. Assessment in this environment is driven by raking students rather than focusing on learning and growth, something that can occur in a competitive environment for some, but not others.  In the year 2014, some outspoken educational reformers, such as Ken Robinson, are now arguing that college might get you a good unpaid internship, but a well paying career is not guaranteed. Prepping for life, on the other hand, according to Tony Wagner in Creating Innovators, is about cultivating mindsets, especially those that support creative problem solving and entrepreneurialism for a rapidly changing global economy.

Regardless of well intentioned educational reform debates, there are still powerful systems of status quo in the higher education realm that are trickling all the way down to pre-kindergarten pedagogy in ways that would make you cringe. College readiness has become synonymous with stressed out, competitive, over-booked youth that struggle with autonomy and are more “at risk” than their lower-income counterparts. Its not good for kids and its not good for family dynamics either.  Assessments used by admissions that support the current status quo in college readiness, good or bad, set the standards for the rest of the independent school industry. Teachers that fall into this category need evidence that making is important for college readiness, as that definition currently stands, in ways that rival standardized test scores. Research and collaboration around best practice for switching from test-based assessments to alternative systems, such as portfolios, is a vital component to keeping makered programs sustainable.

Works Cited:

1. Arias-Carrión, Óscar; Pöppel, Ernst (2007) “Dopamine, learning, and reward-seeking behavior.” Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis, Vol 67(4), 2007, 481-488
2. Barseghian, Tina (July 9, 2014) “A School That Ditches All the Rules, But Not the Rigor” Blog for Mind/Shift KQED.org
3. Borovoy, Amy Erin and Cronin Ashley (2013) “Resources for Understanding the Common Core State Standards” Edutopia article July 2013.
4. Costanza, Kathleen (September 17, 2013) “The Maker Movement Finds Its Way Into Urban Classrooms” Blog for Mind/Shift KQED.org
5. Curtis, Adam (2002) “The Century of the Self” British documentary series on the influence of Sigmund Freud
6. David Kolb’s theory of the “Learning Cycle” http://learningfromexperience.com/
7. Dougherty, Dale founder of MAKE Magazine, from the short documentary “We Are Makers.” Google Trends search for “maker education” and “maker movement”
8. Hardiman, Mariale  and Whitman, Glenn  (Winter 2014) “Assessment and the Learning Brain What the Research Tells Us” Independent School Magazine, NAIS
9. Kolb. D. A. and Fry, R. (1975) “Toward an applied theory of experiential learning;” in C. Cooper (ed.) Theories of Group Process, London: John Wiley.
10. Obama, Barack (June 17, 2014) Presidential Proclamation — National Day of Making, 2014

To an educator, summer brings much needed time for slowing down, reflection, and professional development. I had the opportunity to travel to NH to attend a most unusual, “minds-on” institute where you hang out with interesting maker educators and take the time to explore your ideas.

Constructing Modern Knowledge began with a preview of the week’s exciting events by organizer and inspirer, Gary Stager; engaging speakers, a trip to the MIT Media Lab, and project time are what we had to look forward to.  The day before CMK I loaded my car with thrift store finds including wooden tennis racquets, ping-pong paddles, and a guitar, thinking I would make an Arduino controlled noisemaker.  I started visualizing the design—a handmade mish mash of found materials.

After orienting us to the days ahead, we were asked to propose ideas for projects, having the option to work solo or with a group.  I scoped out the projects: a musical instrument, a drawing robot, or an interactive sound sculpture.  I asked myself….”Should I make my project or join one of these groups?”  I decided to team up.  The noisemaker could wait.

Our group was a diverse bunch of maker teachers: male/female, k-12, from New England to Vietnam, with backgrounds in technology, science, art and robotics. I had never worked with a large team to create an art piece and was excited!

The next fours days brought plenty of “hard” fun.  Members of the team made an Arduino-powered light display, Makey Makey musical keys, worked on building, wiring and circuits and we all had the chance to both share knowledge and learn something new. I am grateful to have been reminded of the power of teamwork.  I look forward to planning a collaborative project this year with my students.  Each individual’s contribution creates the larger whole. Hooray for group work!

With the rest of the summer I look forward to finishing my thrift store pile and will savor every moment of focused time.

What’s the one type of transport you can find in any part of the world? A bike? That’s right. Now Foondi  Workshops is rethinking how we can use bicycles in emerging markets where access to reliable and affordable energy remains out a reach for thousands of people. Foondi held a hands-on design workshop on building a bici-blender. Here’s the original post on Foondi’s Tumblr page.

I finally got around to making Brogan’s cool box. And I got it together only braking one bit.

The first picture shows the box starting to go together.

The second photo shows the clip piece, and my one hint is to squeeze the sides before tying to put them into the assembly.

The final photo shows the completed box.

Amazing design Brogan!

Hi Fellows,

I know that you are all in various states of completion of your guides, along with various states of finishing up your school years. What I’d like to propose we do next on the resource guides is to attempt to have a conversation about next steps. Since the blog post notification is working, let’s try to do it here in the comments on this post.

Questions:

1. What is the one thing you think other teachers will find most useful about your resource guide?
2. Can you see commonalities between the guides beyond the sections in the template?
3. What was the hardest part to complete in your guide?
4. What do you feel is left unfinished about your guide?
5. Of the other guides you reviewed, what was one thing they did that you wished you had included?

Let’s see if this works!

Sylvia

In a week I’ll be presenting, together with L. Arias a short paper at Fablearn Europe.  This is an extract I like to share with you Fellows.

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an ongoing education programme promoted by LABoral Art Centre that uses digital fabrication and ¨making¨ in order to produce methodological change in teaching practice in public schools. Also we present a case study as example of FabLab environment used as constructionist toolkit.

Author Keywords

Making; Children; Constructionism.

Introduction

LABoral Art Centre develops this program in collaboration with the Ministry of Education of Asturias Spain. The aim is to build new learning spaces through research projects, supporting a change in the organizational and curriculum model, more specifically fostering knowledge of technical language in order to achieve a cross-cutting use of ICTs while also encouraging experimentation and critical thinking.

After a training teachers accompany their students in their process of design and producing a project at fabLAB Asturias. This school year experience is an expanded programme of last year experience with teachers working with students in danger of dropping out the education system. Based on that experience, we focused on teacher´s training, designing projects that involve the groups as a whole, even collaborating with the rest of the school and getting everyone more aware of documenting the research process.

The use of fabLAB has been more adapted to production needs, combining designing and production with an expanded experience about fabLAB’s philosophy and uses: making decisions, solving problems, testing and prototyping. The approach allowed teachers to work basic competences and we could try out our fabLAB as a real education laboratory.

Context

Art Centre and Education

The past two decades, the Education Ministry of Asturias has been developing plans and projects adapted to the changing needs of the education community. As a multidisciplinary institution, LABoral produces, distributes and promotes access to new cultural forms arising from the creative use of ICT’s, it seemed natural to start a collaboration, reaching out to a more innovative perspective of education, using creativity and art new languages as pedagogic tools and offer an educative and social use of new technologies.

Turning inside out the traditional idea of an art centre , it is presented as an “expanded classroom” that works in collaboration with local education institutions, starting another interesting research: What is the role of a centre dedicated to art, science and technology in the education field? What can be done to encourage a critical use of new technologies through arts and creativity?

FabLAB Asturias at LABoral

The recent democratization of technologies such as digital fabrication and rapid prototyping, empowers users with the ability to think, hack and create their own designs adapted to their own needs. [1] Formal education lacks a critical approach to technologies, focusing on educating users. A less traditional point of view is needed to ensure future citizens that can not only read but write technology, meaning create and program. [2] Working at the FabLAB gives the opportunity to learn the basics about computer design and object production, becoming a real education laboratory where everyone can learn by making and sharing, establishing a new relationship with technologies. [3]

CASE STUDY: LASER CUTTER AND SILKWORMS

Participants

We present one of the nine groups we are working with as an example of the activities we realized:  18 students and 3 teachers of the Public Primary School “La Pereda”.

Due to our region geography and socio-economical characteristics, a new kind of rural school was activates in the late eighties. Small unitary schools that combine students of different ages in the same classroom and even have different buildings, with teacher moving from one another to work. La Pereda is one of them. This scenario is perfect for project methodology in a way that almost any activity has a direct impact in the whole school.

Methodology

Teacher’s training as a participatory design research

As for all the groups participating in the programme the teachers attended a training in July and September 2013. It was planned as a group investigation process to produce and evaluate prototypes of educational activities which use digital fabrication as a resource to build a proper learning environment in a fabLAB. DBR- Design Based Research was the methodology chosen. It establishes a real investigation process in order to prototypes education activities using digital fabrication as a tool; also analyzing learning difficulties and evaluating results with students at the same time.

As a result the teachers decided not to define a particular product to design, letting the children free to explore and  decide what to do with the resources of the fabLAB. In order to do that they invented a fictional character: Doctor Peredin, a mysterious inventor/scientist who started to communicate with the children using several media and languages (messages in a bottle, air balloons, personal e-mails, letters, laser cutter, drones etc.) to invite the children to explore the fabLAB and its potentiality.

From exploring to decision making: co-design process.

In that happy atmosphere the group started to discuss what to make in FabLAB. After several meeting, they decided to build a new house for the silkworms they are growing at school. The decision was made on the base of a real fact: the death  of several worms because a bad design of the previous box.

By observing the silkworm’s life cycle and its changing needs during the growth the group defined two possible designs. Then they started sketching, drawing, fabricating prototypes, choosing materials and strategies for fabrication.

The teachers and the researchers were observing and stimulating problem solving, sometimes using the fictional character. Also they were choosing on the way, the topics of the official curriculum to treat in class depending on the needs of the research the children were running. For example they decide to work on angles when the group was discussing the design of the modules hosting the silk cocoon, where the angle is a very important feature. Figure 2

Testing the prototypes

Currently the group is working on the testing of the prototypes. During the next 3 months they will use the boxes to grow silkworms and detecting the problematic features of their design.

Outcomes

All through the process of designing and producing each project, the students developed their critical thinking skills and abilities to research and use resources. Also, they established a new relationship as “active users” with technologies. Being responsible for their own learning process had an impact in their self-esteem and offered them an alternative way to deal with problems and making decisions as a group. Also the offset in the typical teacher/student interaction allowed everyone to learn about relational and emotional skills, something a little more complicated than acquiring technological knowledge.

1. Critical perspective to become active technology users (empowerment), allowing a change in their relationship with it and the chance to work with it as a real educational tool.
2. Getting out of the everyday learning spaces changed social roles, allowing teachers to establish an equal relationship and focus on teaching, fulfilling (meeting) both (teachers and students) expectations.
3. A very important part of the programme is the teacher´s training, in order to create innovative learning models that encourage changes in curricula and education system.
4. Students usually show a lack of commitment to mid and long term projects. It is important to say, teachers who took lead of their of learning process, achieved a deeper and better knowledge that allowed them to elaborate resources and tools they can use after this experience and take back to school.
5. Documentation of processes and final results exhibition are essential to draw conclusions and projection to the student’s experience. Teachers were asked to evaluate and share the experiences and the results.

Conclusions

In the design of the learning environments we tried to follow the logic of explore before design [4] in order to improve creativity and enable children to be familiar with the possibility and the potential of a technology or material, specially the fabLAB environment. We think this approach allows  focusing on  the learning process and enables children to manage how to acquire the knowledge they need. Also we noticed that exploring before design helps the participatory making decision and enable the children to construct or improve cognitive models as bases for further learning.

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to all the students and the teachers, the Ministry Of Education of Asturias, the  fabLAB Asturias team.

References

Here at Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn, we have been developing a new physical programming activity called “Machines Gone Wild!” that helps our youth learn about mechanical engineering with mechanisms and physical programming with Arduinos. So many of our youth “think with their hands” while building and last year we found that none of them had ever studied automata or mechanisms in their schools.  The youth teachers also told us they wanted an activity that programs geared motors because in the past, we have only used servo motors.

Developing great activities often starts with inspiration we get from some of the great examples found on the internet.  We took our inspiration for the Cam Mechanisms from the great San Francisco Exploratorium project:

http://tinkering.exploratorium.edu/cardboard-automata

http://www.exploratorium.edu/pie/downloads/Cardboard_Automata.pdf

At Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn we repeat each activity four times because our 34 youth teachers are divided into small learning groups of 8-9.  This works wonderfully for piloting and developing activities.  Each week we get feedback from youth teachers about what would make the activity better for them and then improve our activity design for the next week.  The first week, we had youth teachers cut and build the cam boxes themselves, but they suggested that we fabricate the cam boxes so that they could spend most of their time experimenting with the automata cam mechanisms, rather than cutting cardboard.

So, our wonderful community industrial designer Brad Presler collaborated with mechanical engineer Robert Crowder and I to design a wonderful Cam Mechanism Box, as well as the cams and levers, that we fabricated on our lasercutters with recycled cardboard boxes.

We cut down small dowels from our local hardware store for the axels. Straws and skewers came from the grocery store.  Glue guns helped a lot!

For the physical programming part of the activity, we used Arduinos with Modkit MotoProto Board Shields that have headphone jack plug-ins for inputs and outputs.  A small connector that pressfit our geared motor (http://www.robotshop.com/en/solarbotics-gm9-gear-motor-9.html) attached to the dowel to make the axel move.  We also created LED lights, buttons and potentiometers that could be plugged into the MotoProto Board to add programming options for the automata mechanism.

Arduino Modkit was used as the software.  It allows drag and drop graphical programming, but also has a code view that shows the Arduino code equivalent to the block view to scaffold programming learning.

Here are a few of the projects from our pilot session!

You can see the sun and moon cam in action connected to the geared motor here on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIkLTWIo6NI&feature=youtu.be

Here’s a little video that shows some examples made by our youth teacher and shows the cam mechanism connected to LEDs, geared motor and touch sensor, programmed using Modkit Micro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUH7mLPtkjE&feature=youtu.be

Credit:  We were able to take the time to develop this activity in such a way that we can take it to 600 elementary and middle school youth this summer through a generous grant from the Making the Future Foundation at Cognizant.

Hi FabLearn Folks!

I went through the resource guides this weekend and made a few comments. I see that many of you have adopted the “overview” page so I tried to make most of my comments on those pages. For some of you, there is still no place to start, we have a collection of documents (good stuff!) but still just a collection with no unifying commentary.

We have more time for peer review, but don’t delay!

And this also doesn’t mean that your resources have to stay “frozen” while the peer review is going on, feel free to keep adding.

As always, I’m around to answer questions and provide any feedback. I’ll post office hours on Monday. If you have a request for a time/date, just email me (sylvia at inventtolearn dot com).

Sylvia