Education

DALE DOUGHERTY is the leading advocate of the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine 2005, which first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and this event has spread to nearly 200 locations in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. He is President of Make:Community, which produces Make: and Maker Faire.

In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He believes that the Maker Movement has the potential to transform the educational experience of students and introduce them to the practice of innovation through play and tinkering.

Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.

Nancy Otero is a laser cutter and AI fan. Her biggest passion is human learning, she has spend the last ten years working with educational organizations designing environments that mix technology with project-based learning. Nancy was the Founding Director of Learning Design at Portfolio School, a project-based learning school in NYC. Students from this program are the youngest presenters -6, 8, and 9 years old- at Stanford's conference FabLearn. She was the Director of Professional Development at the Beam Center in NYC, where she created a program that served more than one hundred teachers and thousands of students. She co-founded FAB! a non-profit in Mexico that work with underserved communities for 5 years. Nancy was a OpenAI fellow, and a software engineer in her previous life. She has a Master in Learning, Design and Technology from Stanford University.