This week and weekend we have more education-related events than we ever have before, and we’re delighted to invite you to all of them. This post outlines all that’s happening from Thursday through Sunday of Maker Faire week.
We know teachers are already supreme makers, building smart students every day. And the best teachers we know love to roll up their sleeves and take on do-it-yourself projects with their students. This year, as Maker Faire celebrates the DIY communities in arts, craft, engineering, green design, music, science, tech, and so many other areas, we’re putting a special spotlight on how these activities work in school as part of our “DIY Learning: The New School” pavilion. We welcome all students, teachers and parents to explore both this special exhibit hall along with all the other inspiring examples of learning at Maker Faire.
A special pre-Faire meetup just for teachers
On Thursday, May 17th, from 4-7pm, join us for a special afternoon session co-hosted by MAKE and EdSurge devoted entirely to educators! Become a Maker: you will have time to try your hand at building projects. We’ll talk about how to integrate “making” activities into the classroom with national leaders, Dale Dougherty of Maker Faire, master teacher Gary Stager, and Classroom 2.0’s Steve Hargadon. And you’ll have a chance to meet and talk with local area makers and teachers about what they’re making and how it supports learning in the classroom. Find out how to start a Makerspace or Maker Club at your school, and find out how to get more involved with all our intiatives by meeting Maker Education’s AnnMarie Thomas. Try your hand with MakerBot, Arduinos — both in and out of Coffeebots (seen above), kits from Maker Shed, and more cutting-edge personal fab from the DIY Pavilion. Oh, yes, there will be food, too. And more! You won’t go home empty-handed. This event is open to all educators. And we know teachers love this four-letter word: it’s FREE! But please sign up so we’ll be prepared for your visit.
A unique learning pavilion
In our pavilion DIY Learning: The New School, EdSurge has put together a great selection of “show-and-make” projects to engage you–and some fabulous speakers who will share their insights on the changing nature of learning. Here’s just a taste of what you can expect:
Building real-world projects: Use laser-cutting tools to build bubble wands, boats and 3D toys with our teams from the FabLab. Build electronics circuits (things that blink!) geared for students from elementary school to adults. Brainstorm with master teachers about how to use every day materials for projects–and where to get the ingredients you need. And more.
Building digital projects: Teach it like Khan–learn to put your lessons on a tablet. Create digital portfolios. Design schools of the future with Google Sketchup. Code video games with Scratch, MIT’s kid-friendly programming environment. And more.
Listen and talk with experts. See the section “Plan your visit” (below) for our full schedule. Our leading speakers include…
- John Seely Brown: a well-known visionary on education and co-author of A New Culture of Learning (Saturday 11:30)
- Steve Hargadon: director of the Web 2.0 Labs, host of the Future of Education interview series, chair of the Social Learning Summit, and co-chair the annual Global Education and Library 2.0 worldwide conferences. (Thursday evening and all day Saturday)
- Gary Stager: an internationally recognized educator and consultant, has spent twenty-eight years helping teachers on six continents make sense of their roles in the age of personal computing and schools more constructive places for children. (Thursday evening and Saturday 11:00)
- Dale Dougherty: editor and publisher of MAKE, founder of Maker Faire, and general manager of the Maker Media division of O’Reilly Media, Inc. (Thursday evening and Saturday 1:30)
- Gever Tully: founder of Brightworks and the Tinkering School and author of 50 Things Dangerous Things (you should let your children do). (Sunday 12:30)
Check out our mini Makerspace in this building, too, and sign up to be a part of a network of high schools who make with their students. We’re looking for 10 partners in California during the 2012-13 school year, and 1000 by 2015. You can also meet the people involved with the project at 2:00 Saturday on Center Stage, in the Meeting Pavilion building.
Preview the DIY Learning: The New School pavilion during the Educators’ Meetup Thursday from 4-7pm or come back to enjoy it on Saturday or Sunday. And to prepare for that….
Plan your visit
We have a free app available to download for iPhone, iPad, and Android. You can also go online and choose Makers to visit by topic, for example, all Young Makers.
You could also be kept quite busy just with all the on-stage talks we have that are possibly relevant to your work with kids and inspiring the next generation of Makers.
Check out the Education Stage’s Full Schedule with dozens of talks in the DIY Learning pavilion, woven in below with the other relevant talks on other stages:
11:00 This is What Learning Looks Like! (Education Stage)
12:00 Tinkering and Maker Culture: Transforming K-12 Math and Science Education (Education Stage)
12:30 How Play, Innovation and Imagination Support Learning (Education Stage)
1:00 Raspberry Pi: How a $35 Computer Will Give Students an Appetite for STEM (Center Stage)
1:00 Citizen Science and Space Exploration (Education Stage)
1:30 Discover, Create, Advance: Managing Innovation in 21st Century Classrooms (Education Stage)
1:30 I Make, Therefore I Play — the science behind play: how it shapes the brain, encourages discovery and gets you hired at JPL! (Center Stage)
2:00 Democratizing Design: Enabling the Crowd and the Next Generation — includes MENTOR, inspiring the next generation of innovators by introducing students at 1,000 high schools to distributed digital design and programmable manufacturing technologies. (Center Stage)
2:00 Teaching eTextiles to Young Makers (Education Stage)
2:30 Every Child a Maker — announcing an exciting new initiative that seeks to create more opportunities in the community for young people to make (Center Stage)
3:00 Scratch – Programming and Animation for Kids of All Ages (Education Stage)
3:30 Where Are The Black Makers? — kids need mentors, role models, heroes! Diversity in STEM needs help! (Innovation Stage)
3:30 TweetHaus – Public Art, Citizen Science, and Collaboration (Education Stage)
4:00 OpenROV – Open Source Underwater Robots (Education Stage)
4:30 Transformative Learning: Research Evidence for Learning Through Making (Education Stage)
5:00 Adaptive Apps to Spark Creativity and Master Language Learning (Education Stage)
5:30 Mothership HackerMoms: First Women’s Hackerspace. Ever. — come hear about how one hackerspace gets more women making
5:30 Better, Cheaper, Faster! Open Source Books (Education Stage)
6:00 Designing Spaces for Inspired Learning (Education Stage)
6:30 Tinkering and Maker Culture: Transforming K-12 Math and Science Education (Education Stage)
11:00 How to Play with Numbers (Education Stage)
11:30 Code is Literacy: Code Hero, a Game that Teaches How to Make Games (Center Stage)
11:30 Thinking Inside the Box: the Blessing of Constraints (Education Stage)
12:00 Recycled Computers with Open Source OS for Schools and Individuals (Education Stage)
12:30 Lessons Learned from Creating an Innovative School: BrightworksSF (Education Stage)
1:00 Major in Making! (Education Stage)
1:30 Creating a Middle School 3D Prototyping Lab (Education Stage)
1:30 The Story Behind DIY.org — an online community for maker kids (Center Stage)
2:00 The Importance of Being Earnest (in Documenting Your Stuff) (Education Stage)
2:30 Making Professional Makers – Career Tech Ed Instructors Talk Shop — ensuring that “making things” remains a significant part of the American educational curriculum (Innovation Stage)
2:30 20 Tenets of Tinkering: Learning from Kids Who Make (Education Stage)
3:00 littleBits Electronics (Education Stage)
3:30 Tell It Like It Is: Getting Your Lessons into Students Hands (Education Stage)
4:00 Summit Design Studio: Learning for the Next Generation (Education Stage)
4:30 Connecting for Real: How Technology Helps Kids Pursue Their Dreams (Education Stage)
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