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 »

We’ve all done that classic maker activity at one time or another: the paper cut out snowflake. Most makers would agree that paper is one of our most basic, essential materials. For me, many of my earliest “Making Memories” are from time spent playing out in the snow! Therefore I would like to suggest that… Read more »

In 2015 an association of local businesses asked me and some colleagues to organize a robotics after school lab for five different first-grade classes in the Bologna area. Our committee had seen the milkBot, a little robot that combines the  open-source Arduino microcontroller with scrap material, and they wanted to offer a similar creative experience… Read more »

I am not a maker. I am a maker. I am not a maker. I am a maker. I fear making. I feared making. I fear making new things. I feared making new things until I made them. I wasn’t good at making things when I was a kid. I didn’t know that what I… Read more »

Materials: 2-speed 12VDC Windshield wiper motors, PVC pipe, bubble wrap/foam pool noodles, various connectors/motor arms, various hand and power tools, props and costumes, iPad or mini projector This unit was designed to explore the possibilities of how far into the world of animatronics students could go in our makerspace. Animatronics is a unique and mostly… Read more »

SolidWorks is a CAD program, stated to be the world’s most popular, used widely in the manufacturing industry, and it’s a program I teach to Kindergarteners. You might be wondering, Why teach SolidWorks to young children at all when free programs such as Tinkercad exist? Well, initially I had a very specific purpose for teaching… Read more »

During the past years I’ve been deeply interested in creativity. In this post I’ll try to condense some strategies aimed to stimulate children’s creative expression in the classroom that I’ve tested in my physical programming classes, and analyzed during my master’s research. Most of the strategies presented here are not based merely on personal insights,… Read more »

In Edith Ackerman’s paper “Hidden Drivers of Pedagogic Transactions: Teachers as Clinicians and Designers,” she shows that as teachers take on the role of clinicians (facilitating communication around a problem) and designers (imagining and creating a safe learning environment for exploration and negotiation of old and new thoughts), a pedagogic transaction takes place between the… Read more »