Twice a week I coach an Odyssey of the Mind team.  All week I collect scraps, recyclables and cast away objects to bring to meetings for them to peruse.  The process of searching through these materials inspires the gadgets they create, the props they invent, and costumes they fashion.  Through the practice of re-purposing and… Read more »

It may be snowing right now but that doesn’t mean that my kids are idle by any means…. We’ve only got 6 weeks left until we launch a balloon to space!  Yup, that’s right its Global Space Balloon Challenge time!  If you haven’t heard about this great project, or just want to know more then… Read more »

The following post was written by Jamie Bartels in responce to attending the Invent to Learn: Reggio Emilia workshop offered by Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez at the Marymount School in New York City on February 12, 2015. He attended both as a student of early education and as newly appointed Maker Space coordinator for… Read more »

(This blog post was written in Feb 2015. Thanks to Sylvia Martinez for editing this blog post.) Last week, I got a chance to visit the Bourn Idea Lab, a FabLab@School at Castilleja School in Palo Alto. I spent one and a half hours observing interactions in a maker class for my study about learning environment… Read more »

Recently I was tasked (or really I tasked myself) with creating a writeup of our program at our (Lighthouse Creativity Lab) website.  When I heard  there were questions about embedding making and a maker mindset into standards based curriculum, I thought I would share my writeup here.  In addtion to this overview, we have narratives… Read more »

At Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, I worked with 6 groups this year from primary school to high school, each one with a different project. Consequently a lot of prototypes are hanging around the fabLAB. In order to keep the lab not too messy I decided to have each group fabricate stackable boxes… Read more »

The 2014/2015 FabLearn Fellows cohort is a diverse group of 18 educators and makers. They represent eight states and five countries, and work with a wide range of ages at schools, museums, universities and non-profits. Throughout the course of the year, they will develop curriculum and resources, as well as contribute to current research projects…. Read more »

One of the things I like about letting students decide what they need to make for their projects is how much learning takes place between the moment they say “I want to make a model of the Taj Mahal to show how the architecture reflects the way Shah Jahan wanted to memorialize his wife” and… Read more »

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 »

by Keith Ostfeld Okay, we’re not really “making code.” But, we are working to add in a coding aspect to our Invention Convention exhibition. This exhibition currently allows families to make and tinker with common objects in order to solve challenges as well as learn and apply techniques in a more focused setting in our… Read more »