 Hi, my name is Steve Sherman from Cape Town in South Africa. I run an NGO and we teach about four and a half thousand students a week in Cape Town and around the world through the internet. And we make it our goal to make maths and science and engineering very exciting to young students. So we've been involved with STEM and STEAM, which is STEM with the arts added to it, for at least 20 years. And in the last few years we got involved with the maker movement. And it all started out with a video on YouTube called Kane's Arcade. And if you get a chance to watch that video, I'll certainly put that in the resources, about a young boy who was bored during his summer holidays and would find that to pass the time he would build these immaculate arcade games out of cardboard boxes in his father's workshop. And of course his father ran a motorspears workshop, so there were plenty of boxes around. And a filmmaker came along one day, discovered these amazing arcade games. And the father said, there's a bit of a running joke because at the moment this filmmaker, Nirvan, is the only customer that has come to his arcade. So Nirvan of course couldn't stand for this and he used his connections to spread the word that Kane needed customers to come and play at his arcade. And they took Kane out one Sunday and when he arrived back, half of Los Angeles were all crowded around, ready to play. And of course Nirvan made some money, he raised some money for Kane to cover Kane's college fees and they made well over $250,000, but then there was a surplus. So what did they do with that extra money? They started the Imagination Foundation. And this is a wonderful initiative to promote the excitement and the joy of making and creativity. And they thought, well, let's at least get a global cardboard challenge going where they got schools around the world who take part annually to build the most elaborate designs out of cardboard boxes. And then of course they also launched the Imagination Chapters, of which I run one in South Africa. It's the first one in South Africa. And basically we meet with students every week to do hands-on activities, creative activities. Some involve digital, whether it be making movies or designing code for their own apps or games. We've been playing games, we've been making food. We've been doing a whole range of skills that allow the children to tap into their creativity and start having fun with their learning. And I think when you see some of the projects, you will not only be envious, but you will certainly want to get involved in many of these activities. The good news is there are now a hundred of these chapters, Imagination Chapters, around the world. And there might be one very close to you. Of course there are make affairs and many make affairs going on and various maker spaces, places where you can do these sorts of activities all the time. And of course I will put a list of all the resources on the internet and I would love to get you involved in the maker movement. So let's take a journey down memory lane over the last couple of years where I can showcase some of the activities that we've been involved with. And I think when you see the excitement and the smiles on the children's faces, including the parents and the adults that we're facilitating, you will see that these are not just activities that are out of reach of the ordinary person. They are very doable. You don't have to spend much money to do these things. And the best part is that these kids are starting to tap into their creativity, a side which often gets neglected when you're looking at a formal school environment. So I'll try and narrate some of the pictures and videos, but I think that the photographs and the videos will speak for themselves. So we're going to kick off with the global cardboard challenge. Here we have Nirvan and Kane when they did a TV appearance and they got to speak to some of our kids. You're going to see a selection of photographs of students making and building things out of cardboard. And these were from the various global cardboard challenges. They were making arcade games and sometimes they were making satellites and space related items. That's a little pinball machine that was a ball flicking machine and we'll get to see a sample of that a little bit later. And of course we had to have judges from overseas to take part in the competition to make it that much more exciting. You can see that the student is shooting the paper balls at the box. And of course here we have the Wacker finger game. Quite simplistic but very effective. And from the cardboard challenge you'll see that some of these boxes were launched as rockets and definitely very impressive to see. And all ages and all abilities were taking part using their creativity, building different outfits whether it be space related or if there was fashion related you'll see a couple of other photographs a little bit later on involving fashion and superhero outfits as well. Here we've got the kids to make things with cardboard but these were activities where they had to build the highest tower that could hold the greatest mass. Here they had to build bridges and it was the longest bridge that could hold the heaviest mass. Now we go to our imagination chapter where every week we set little targets for the kids to do. Here we gave them little jellies and toothpicks and we allowed them to use their imagination to build whatever came to mind and the creativity that came out of this activity was absolutely fantastic. The youngest kids obviously built very simplistic shapes and things and the older kids got into it and built the 3D structures and absolutely loved the whole engineering aspect of it. And of course we also then tried our hand at the different types of games that you can play and we tried some innovative games. This one here is a game that you have to use your mind to move the ball across the device and in this particular exercise the kids had to invent their own game and you can see the inventor game grid which we made and the kids would pick different numbers randomly and then that would lead to them selecting certain aspects environment, objective, structure, action, roles and of course the equipment they need and I'll let one of the kids explain what he did. The boxes are set up at one side of the field and then the three teams are on the other side. Each team consists of three people. The boxes have to be quite large. You have to run from one end of the blower whistle and you also have three boxes. You have to run to the other end of the field and then all of the players of each team need to climb the same box. You climb into the box. In the same box. Yes. And then the first team to get all the people into the box wins. That is so cool. And for different sessions we play different games here. For example we got the kids busy making things with Lego and then we introduced them to the hexa-hexaflexagon which is a great little thing that you can fold up and it has mystery sides hidden inside it and the kids made a giant one which they then decorated and came to demonstrate in the class which was very exciting and of course we also play lots of games involving parachutes and teamwork and these are the kinds of things that you learn from games like leadership skills, cooperation, sometimes strategy so we got in on the act as well and no one likes to lose when it comes to wizards, warriors and goblins which is a fantastic giant version of rock-paper-scissors but obviously using wizards, warriors and goblins instead which the kids thoroughly enjoyed and then we played games that involved finding out who had the coin and it was obviously hidden behind someone's hand and once again teamwork and leadership skills were exploited to try and identify who had the mystery coin and in a lot of our sessions we play games that involve for example moving from chair to chair and once again lots of teamwork this was a fun exercise where we got the kids to make solar ovens they had to build solar ovens out of pizza boxes we then took the pizza boxes outside and we put them in the sun for about 20 minutes we measured the before temperature and the after temperature so we could actually see if the boxes were indeed attracting heat and cooking the biscuits with chocolate on top and as you will see there's a photograph of the biscuits and chocolate in the sun starting to melt without a pizza box and then we put one with the pizza box and you can see that the results were significantly better with the solar ovens and of course much yummier when the chocolate was melted in between the biscuits and I'm sure you'll see some happy faces of the solar chefs that we managed to produce on that particular day and of course it's not only cooking and it's not only eating chocolate which is a great way to learn we also introduced the kids to a whole range of other things for example here we have superhero outfits made out of paper so the kids would design their own superhero costumes only using newspaper, pairs of scissors and of course sticky tape so this enabled the kids to show their creativity to design the kinds of things that they thought that superheroes would wear and we were very fortunate enough to receive a sponsored box of little bits and these are incredible tools for kids to play with it's basically electronic kits that connect with magnets and you basically leave the box with the kids and they spent an entire hour and a half playing with all these pieces of equipment and we didn't even have to intervene because the kids were having so much fun of course parents and grandparents that came to drop the kids off were so intrigued that they got involved as well and some of the kids took these little bits and then involved them in some of the additional projects that we were doing a couple of weeks later and hopefully we'll get to see some photographs of that but in one particular project one of the kids built a replica of Table Mountain which is a very famous mountain in Cape Town and he used the little bits to design the cable car that goes from the top of the mountain down back to the base station and hopefully we'll see a little bit of a video clip of how he managed to do that just using creativity and ingenuity but before we get onto that this is just a little video clip of the kids interacting and playing and it doesn't matter how old you are the kids were so intrigued to try and copy some of the projects that were suggested there that literally we couldn't actually get close to them here is the replica of the cable car and the pulley system that would use the little bits to get the servo motor turning and that would then make the cable car move while one was coming up, one was coming down and here's a little video clip of that happening and that really was impressive, a paper mache Table Mountain which they had spent the afternoon making and of course we had to troubleshoot there were times where the cable car wouldn't work and we had to try and work out what was the cause of that and that's great for problem solving and engineering sometimes for example the base station was too high or maybe it was too low or perhaps it was leaning or perhaps the string wasn't taught enough and then of course the cable car would be caught on the bottom hook making is one thing but baking is another so we brought a standard pancake mix and then we got the kids to put things on the pancake mix and make their own pancakes and one of the kids brought a whole batch of pancakes with her the following week and I'll let her explain what she did and who made them how long did it take you 20 minutes and how many did you make 3 burnt I didn't bring them did you eat those my dad ate one that's what we normally supposed to do eat the burnt ones, wink wink the ones that apparently were burnt but never actually got burnt those ones or do they actually get burnt they actually got burnt why do you think they're burnt you think it was too hot the first couple are generally an experiment you kind of adjust the heat from there anyway but that's brilliant, they do look delicious it's zoom in oh yeah making and baking is one thing but engineering is very important and designing the best paper aeroplane that can either fly very far or spend the most amount of time in the air these are very important skills as well and loads of fun as you can see we then did some shadow puppets and we got the kids to cut out paper shapes and then display them using the light of the projector and some of them realised that they could be quite creative by folding the paper in half and cutting patterns out and then when you unfold it there'll be symmetrical shapes on either side and some of them made vampires and some of them made these very cool little motifs and they generally had a lot of fun we're also very involved with the afro bot tournament and building robots to compete against each other in this particular case they had to collect tins and place the tins in a certain spot and we've also had afro bot tournaments where they had to play football against each other or soccer as we call it in South Africa and of course there are just so many different iterations of how you can make these robots and these are all designed by parts that people have found all over the place so I hope that you've seen a little taste of some of the activities that we've been doing we've done way more than that but we just don't have time to tell you all about it in 20 minutes but I have given you some ideas on our website and I'll give you a few ideas here in this video and then of course please feel free to email me or contact me I'd be happy to send you loads more ideas if you've started and perhaps you can even team up with one of the imagination chapters in your area and hopefully get the excitement of the maker movement going in your classes