Maker Education is such a valuable role. These stories will bring you the latest information and tales of maker educators who area spreading the maker mindset. Help others learn how to make things or how to think like a maker at makerspaces, schools, universities, and local communities. The importance of maker education can not be understated. We appreciate our educators.
I was about five pages in when I discovered a major obstacle: I didn’t have any of the tools the book required to do the suggested projects and experiments. I realized that despite my commitment to learning and my eagerness to get started, my goal of going from Zero to Maker would be impossible if I didn’t have the right tools.
I have a bunch of those Reader’s Digest and Time-Life build, repair, maintain handyman books. Way before MAKE and before the internet became an on-demand learning source for just about anything (back when the alt.science.repair USENET FAQ was the best resource out there), these sorts of books were a godsend if you wanted to learn the basics on building a deck, tiling a bathroom, fixing your own appliances.
I learned simple things like which way to hold the soldering iron and how to clean the tip before soldering — trivial to an experienced maker, but nerve-wracking to the newbie. As important as such subtle learning was, the big lesson didn’t hit me until the following day while I was showing a friend my MintyBoost: the journey from Zero to Maker was going to be primarily-project based. As much as I wanted to learn, I wouldn’t really absorb anything unless I had a project (or series of projects) to center that learning around.
Starting in 1995, Frank Kovac took ten years constructing amechanical globe planetarium of his own design despite having no prior engineering experience. The Kovac Planetarium in Monico Wisconsin is only the fourth of its kind ever built as well as being the largest in history at 4000 pounds and 22 feet in diameter.
The MIT Open Courseware (OCW) radar materials from Dr. Gregory L. Charvat (and peers) that Matt blogged about back in February have just been released! This is hands-on education that my father, for one, spent a few years of his life (and no small amount of money) to acquire at a fancy university in the late 1960s.
The Build Your Own Light Bulb Kit, from the Maker Shed, is a fun science kit designed to excite and engage experimenters of all ages. Recreate Edison’s experiments that lead to the development of the first real light bulb. The kit contains everything (except batteries) you need to build your own working light bulb using the included vacuum chamber and a number of different filament materials including carbon and tungsten.
As I develop new projects for my classroom this summer, a recurring theme has been to explore just how many times it takes to get a new design right. As far as I am concerned, nothing ever works properly the first time, and it is useful for students and new learners to a subject to recognize this. Programmers call this the iterative process, Engineers use the Engineering Design Process, both of which are relatives to the scientific method. Sure, just about anything can be fixed with duct tape and zip ties, but to get beyond a temporary kludge, you will need to put some time and thought into analyzing the problem and crafting a proper solution.
