 I think it's a really unique thing to learn about engineering and how things work and I think it's really fun to apply it into things that we like to do and to create something that's really unique. Welcome to the last day of the K-12 online conference. Today we're going to be talking about STEAM, Creating and Maker Mindset. I'm Vinnie Verratti, the Director of Academic Technology at Quest Academy, a K-8 gifted school located in Palatine, Illinois. I'm Cheryl Peterson, a teacher at Quest Academy teaching engineering design. In this presentation, we're going to be talking about the conditions which can cultivate a maker mindset in your school. How to arrange your classroom, how to set up curriculum so students will work collaboratively and creatively together. And lastly, we'll have students talk about the impact that this class has had on their lives. So one of the reasons that I find that this is important is that as a middle-aged male adult, students are not having the same experiences that I had. If I wanted to use a computer back in the mid-70s, I had to build it. I had to program it and teach it how to work with all of the different things. And as an adult as I take a look around, there's some things that scare me. The first of which is you take a look around and you see babies and strollers and instead of interacting with the world, you see them behind the two-dimensional pane of glass with their parents' iPad. And as students get older, they may do some really neat creative things in terms of some of the computer science through the use of Minecraft. But even then, they're building items and objects which engineering-wise would not be able to be built in real life. I find students that don't even know how to fold, cut, or use simple tools to create anything in the three-dimension. They are stuck in a two-dimensional plane and it's difficult for them to break out and actually build. Yeah, so I mean, growing up, I know that I worked and built forts and built ramps and used tools and chemistry sets and it's that inventiveness that I think that we're missing at this particular point. The Maker Teacher needs to supply the right tools, show them how they work and then let them be free, let them experiment and actually start to build and find out what works and doesn't. So there are three important elements that make up a maker space. The most important is people. Without the people in the right mindset, no matter what you have, you're not going to be able to really leverage those particular sets of tools. The second thing that you need to have is you need to have a curriculum or a pedagogy to go along with that. And you can have the right people in the right curriculum and not even have the third element, which is the space. Other schools have developed and invested a lot in the space, but they don't have the curriculum and the people behind it and so therefore that won't help them get to their end goal and their desired ability to do the makings. So what is it about people? What type of people do you need to have? What does your teacher maker look like? Well, David Lang, who's written a new book called Zero to Maker, Learn Just Enough to Make Just About Anything, talks about the need for a persistent tinkering mentality. This persistent tinkering mentality is a combination of unshakable optimism and unlimited opportunity and a never-ending satisfaction. For those of you who have studied Dweck and Dweck's mindsets, this is the same as a growth mindset, the ability to understand that we grow, that we can continue to cultivate that it's not a fixed entity. Designers and makers at IDO in California, a very well-known design firm, have come up with a set of values that designers and makers could live by. They include things like embrace ambiguity. Don't start out knowing the answer. Start out not knowing where you're going to end up. Learn from failure. This is a very important one. Be optimistic. Have a bright outlook that it's going to succeed. Pay it forward. Maybe make your neighbor look successful. Help others to succeed at what they're doing. Talk less, do more, and take ownership. I'm fortunate enough to work with Sheryl, who has a maker at heart and also models the making within our space, so that when we needed to have new equipment, we wanted a green screen and we wanted design boards. We didn't go out and buy them. Sheryl went to the hardware store and picked up umbrellas and fabric and gator board and pegs and wood, and she's built all of these particular tools for our lab. So not only are we teaching the students and cultivating that maker mindset, but we're also doing our best to try to model this for them. It's important to have the right curriculum in place to support this making mindset. In a lot of schools, they're looking to develop a student-centered learning or problem-based learning, and this really helps the maker culture really develop within there. The maker culture can help make those environments and those particular pedagogies and curricula much deeper and much richer. But if you take a look around, many schools are already using a maker culture and have maker culture involved in them. And there's a lot of different places. You just don't use that vocabulary and you don't call them that. So if you look at elementary schools, especially in early childhood, kindergarten, first grades, you'll have centers that include recycle art centers or sand tables or water tables or blocks that allow students to build and create and make within there. In a lot of schools that falls into your art classrooms and your art classrooms and design studios enable the students to have the hands-on experience to build. And in some places where you have hands-on science, labs are really maker spaces. Again, we may just need to change the vocabulary. Yes, James Dex cites that his maker space is considered applied constructionism. And it's more like an art room. Students come in, they learn about a certain tool by seeing the demonstration and run with it, go from there. So what is it that's unique about our curriculum that we're trying to implement in this first year in this space? I'm trying to use student motivation to engage the students with their own problems. So the design problem comes from them and they take their own path to solve that problem. So in the midst of a class, you have 12 different students. How many projects are undergoing at that time? Possibly 12, but sometimes they join together, band together into small groups and found some commonalities between their problems or actually are working on the same problem together. So collaboration happens naturally in that environment. And in my case, with my section of the class, some students are working on more than one project at a time. So within the 12 students, they may be working on 16 different individual projects, which from a teacher standpoint is scary because you may not have the answers to all of their various different questions. But that's part of the maker mindset, that optimism that we'll go out and we'll learn this together or ask so-and-so because so-and-so may have already gone through that or ask a general question because someone may have a new novel idea in which to help tackle that problem. Exactly. Students are a wealth of information. Many of them have already been down the path and have learned something and are very happy to share with their neighbor next door. They're the instant expert, the one that just took the first steps first. So in terms of space, one of the things you want to do is you want to start small. You don't have to spend more than a couple hundred dollars in order to get started. Greg Hill at the disruption department down in St. Louis actually ran an entire maker space for less than $200 for the course of the year. Chances in your school, you're already doing some of this if you look around. In terms of steps, you want to start small. A great way to start is with cardboard and duct tape and glue. Think about Keynes Arcade Challenge. You do not need the expensive tools or the add-on computer components. Think about NASA summer camps for young makers. They had students making robotic hands out of cardboard, rubber bands, and string. And then in ramping up within your space, you can add the tools as your budget allows and what's needed. We had the benefit and the good fortune of having our parents really support this space. So we've had the ability to transform an old computer lab space and really repurpose it into a maker space. Yes, we've added a vinyl cutter, a laser cutter, and a 3D printer. So we are very lucky to have such a piece of equipment. And with this space, you also need to think about form and function. So one of the things that we have in our space is almost all of our furniture is on wheels so that we can reconfigure it to meet our needs for that particular class. Students are taught how to move the furniture, how to change the furniture up from being against the wall to out and open where they can form their own workspace so they're able to change and adapt their space as they need. And so just think flexible, but think open and think designed studio. I had a young student come up to me just about a week ago and his story was kind of interesting and he said that this was his favorite class to come in to work within the design studio and within our studio we're working with three 43-minute blocks with the students. And the reason he said that this was his the best thing about the school and the reason he really enjoyed coming to school was the fact that in other classes that everybody was working towards the same end. You were given a set of resources, you were given materials, worksheets, books, and you were all working towards a final destination. And in this course he really enjoyed the opportunity to learn about some new tools but then to take it and to apply it to what he wanted to learn. And so he could go in a completely different direction than someone else did. I asked my students to design their own problem so come up with something that's bothering them, maybe something bugs them that they want to fix in their little world and then they must design their problem and come up with their own solutions, brainstorm, prototype, test, et cetera. One of the things that I find is that students have to break out of the mold because we have the students in middle school, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade and they've already learned to play the game of school. The constant question is how much of this do I have to do? When is this due? What are you looking for? And it's all these questions about the specific assignment. They're wanting to please me rather than pleasing themselves and so to get them to break out of that mold has really, really been interesting. The students actually asked me to give them a problem when I said, come up with your own design problem. They said, well, can't you just give us the problem, Mrs. Peterson? And I said, no, you need to go back and think. Look around your world, find something you know that needs to be redesigned and start redesigning. And so really it's a shift from being passive to being an active participant in your environment. So if you've gotten this far, you may want to find out how you can begin to implement a maker space yourself. And there's a variety of different resources which we're going to share. The first of which is to deal with the paper book. And one of the best is that came out just this past spring was Invent to Learn by Sylvia Martinez and Gary Steger. They were the keynote and if you've not had an opportunity to see their keynote in the K-12, please check their keynote out. I'm sure that it is fabulous. Invent to Learn is a guideline where you can find a number of resources. You can find examples, case studies and exactly why you should be moving your class from where you are now to more making. For me, one of the books that really was important was Play by Dr. Stuart Brown. This is an older book. It's been out for about six or seven years and it really talks about the need for unstructured space and unstructured time. And so many of our kids are coming over scheduled and scheduled within school and running lockstep from point A to point B that they really aren't just giving time just to be and play. And this really gives a lot of information about that. FAB is a great book capturing the ideas from the FAB lab at MIT and telling you just how to take personal fabrication to a new level. In terms of thinking about the space that you're wanting to put it in, there are a number of different resources just to think about the space. The first of them that I'd like to share is a book, The Third Teacher. The Third Teacher talks about the environment being the new classroom and the new element of the classroom that we need to think. And it's one of the reasons that we have this flexible and adaptable space. They were really driven from the ideas which were in this book. It comes with 79 different ideas on how to rethink and repurpose what we teach in. There's another book called Make Space based on the D-School at Stanford. I gleaned several ideas out of that book and modified down to fit our special needs what we need in our building and what would work best for our students. So if you go to Make Space and find out what they're doing in California I'm sure you'll find several ideas that can be adapted, modified to your needs. The real Bible in terms of this environment is Make Magazine and all the resources that they have all the Make Books and things. And so they've got a number of different things. Make Magazine comes out quarterly. Right now they have a buy one, get one free offer so that you can get your subscriptions. They also have a series of books how to use your 3D printer or electronics. And one of the books that they've put out for free is the Make Space Playbook that if you want to build a makerspace into your lab what are some of the steps that you have and where you can get some additional resources and materials. Additionally, you want to connect with others and that's really where the maker the inner change and collaboration that occurs. And so one of the things that would challenge you is to find the local makerspaces. One of the places you really want to check is your public libraries. Locally in the Chicago area many libraries are beginning to implement these types of tools especially into their teen services or youth services department. The Evanston Public Library the Arlington Heights Public Library Hub the North Public Library have all added these particular spaces. Downtown the Chicago Public Library has an innovation lab where they have visiting teams come in and out and different things are highlighted at different times of the year. You can go to their website and check their schedule. Other places are the FAB Labs and we refer to that in terms of the book FAB. But FAB Labs is a particular type of lab but there's also makerspaces which are popping up all over and you'll see how to get to the variety of different resources and different spaces so you can give them a call and go visit and see what they're offering at that point. Maker Fairs and many maker fairs a good way to get started I went to the Chicago Northside Maker Fair which was awesome and we went to Sher's High School and visited all types of makers they had lots of examples and people involved in making there was a great experience. And it's a great place to take the family too because it's for all ages. There's soldering, there's bubble blowing, there's lock picking. It depends on what you're interested in on that particular day. Other places to go to include conferences and Sheryl, you want to talk about your experience. Yes, I went to Constructing Modern Knowledge out in Manchester over the summer. It was awesome run by Gary and Sylvia our keynotes together from all around the world spent four days to get together making and building you could skip around and learn many different tools you could just focus on one tool and construct all four days in the same area it was an awesome experience I brought everything back to my classroom so it wasn't just a sit and get conversation? No, there was no sitting there was up and doing and making all four days Other conferences are beginning to incorporate and to wrap this ISTI's upcoming 2014 annual conference is going to have a half day maker fair I have been asked to be part of the team to put that together for this upcoming conference but there are other national conferences that are doing the same. ALA last summer was in Chicago at McCormick Place I was able to be present on the Maker Monday where librarians came together to gain understanding what is the maker movement how does it relate to libraries and I met several local people including the Chicago Public Library folks and it was awesome to see the excitement building around maker spaces in libraries. And there's a number of different ways in social media to begin to connect if you are a Twitter user you can follow the MakerEd hashtag and they also have a conversation, a tweet chat that typically occurs on Tuesday evenings at 7 o'clock Eastern 4 o'clock Pacific and if you're on Twitter you just search out the hashtag MakerEd and it's a great place to get in connection with other people who are building these types of spaces and who are cultivating that maker mindset within their schools. Additionally there are a couple others Tammy Brass who is at the St. Paul Academy and Summit School up in Minnesota has put together a Twitter list of makers Additionally she has created and shared a set of digital bookmarks and so if you're looking for the information to take to your administration as to why this is important and what you can do to work within that you can access both the Twitter list as Tammy's put together as well as the digital bookmarks. And then lastly I'm sure that if you've watched Sylvia and Gary's presentation they'll talk about the Google Doc list of makers and maker spaces in K-12 schools across the country here is the URL in that particular document and so that you can take a look at it and get in contact with some of these different folks including us we're on that list as well but again it's really about you taking the leap and being comfortable in taking the leap to get involved and learn more yourself it's really about becoming a lifelong learner. Yes we're happy to help good luck. Thank you for joining us today we're going to talk about the global maker space at your school and helping your students become more creative and collaborative. And if you have any other questions or comments you have a couple different ways to get in contact with us the first is to leave a comment on the K-12 online blog post that this session is attached to the other thing is that you can email Cheryl and we'll try to get back to you in a timely fashion. Thanks. I think it shows us also that engineering that relates to life in many different ways and it's actually a lot of very fun actually.