The growth of makerspaces in education was interrupted by the shutdown of schools, libraries, and museums over the last year. Now, as students return to in-person learning, there is an even greater need for maker educators who can provide hands-on making and project-based learning experiences. In addition, making is a practice that can be learned and shared among educators. The Make: Education Forum brings together maker educators of all levels to learn best practices from each other.
The Make: Education Forum is a virtual event occurring from August 3-5. Over the course of the event practitioners will explore, share and implement programs for making in K-12 education. This will be an event filled with “how-to” sessions and workshops that introduce projects and methods that you can use to design or expand your own maker program. It’s a unique opportunity to meet other maker educators as well as expert makers.
Among the how-to sessions:
- Connect projects to schools subjects
- Explore resources for an educational makerspace
- Build useful IoT applications that use hardware and software to produce data
- Organize and plan for a semester-long making program
- Help students find and scope local problems that they can work on
- Turn making into a team sport
- Produce a School Maker Faire
- Low-budget, low-tech making
- Incorporate and foster the maker mindset in your school and district
- Run educational programs in a community makerspace
- Expand your libraries engagement
- Develop connections with museums, clubs and other out of school programs
The Make: Education Forum aids and encourages those who are tasked with organizing and running makerspaces and maker programs and to grow what they offer. Most of the talks will be from maker educators themselves sharing what they’ve learned from their experiences. We will have a technical track covering aspects of 3D printing, laser cutters, robotics, electronics, and more. We will also have kit developers talk about what they offer and how educators can build programs around them. The goal of the Make: Education Forum is to transform education by focusing on the needs and interests of educators and their students by developing new technical skills encourage the process of creative problem-solving.
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