 Hello K-12 online viewers and listeners. Thanks for dropping into my video. This video is all about steam maker, STEM, steam and maker education. This is aimed at beginners. Why and how beginners might start. If you're an advanced maker, good for you. Go get them. But nobody, if nobody's following you with what you're doing and in your school and you're by yourself and people think you're just that weirdo tinkering around in the other room, you might want to share this video with your colleagues. We're going to talk about bridging traditional STEM to phenomenal maker spaces. I'm Ginger Lumen. I like to work with reluctant teachers. Reluctant teachers, they want to do the right thing. I do believe that. They have heart, they have passion, but they deserve to know how and why things are going to work for them and for their students. So that's what I like to do. I like to work with those teachers. Let's jump on in. I've been working with STEM since back in 2004, trying to convince legislators to create advanced programs for gifted learners. This was done back in the depth of No Child Left Behind and we've built our STEM programs there originally. They start a lot and continue on with what I don't know. I'm calling them our teddy bear projects. They're soft, they're cuddly, they're familiar, they're friendly. Things like spaghetti bridges. I look at that picture and think there's maybe some low-level engineering going on there, but spaghetti bridges is something that we do on a regular basis. Egg drops, they're lovely, they're fun, intentional. Mathematics, the learning that's happening there. Yes, great teachers do put a lot of that intentionality and mathematics into it, but I think that too many teachers don't necessarily. I think maybe they do egg drops as kind of a culminating fun project and move it on and they call it STEM and it's not so much. I've seen even biology teachers work with animal adaptations and do things like paper mache. Are they teaching anatomy? Are they just doing it to bring in art? Is it engineering? I'm not sure and they do it at various levels of success. Of course, our more recent favorite teddy bear project is our bungee Barbie. I don't know, there's some worksheets here. We can do STEM with worksheets and I get why we do that. It's about reflection. It's about making sure to have that rigor in there that maybe that egg drop doesn't have and it's okay. I mean, it's better than just tossing the Barbie over the edge and saying yay, but I wonder if worksheets, I wonder if they really truly engage. I wonder if that's what really trying to do. I mean, bless our souls, we're trying aren't we? Many of our teachers in our schools have started to move or have already moved from STEM to STEAM to add in the arts. But what if we rethink technology and instead of saying technology because technology is everywhere, it's like making the tea thinking or something, right? What if we changed it to tinkering? I mean, I pictured Gepetto in his workshop building things. Little old man in his garage venting the neatest coolest next. What if we asked kids to tinker, right? What's the value there? What if instead of saying arts and thinking paper mache or crayons or paint or sculpting, what if instead we went with aesthetics? Because even an engine or the internals of a wind turbine can be beautiful, right? I mean, why not? In adding tinkering and aesthetics, I think we start moving into that engineering field a little bit better. And the world is going to be getting a whole lot cooler once we start moving toward that maker movement. A lot of people I talk with are say they're not sure what the maker movement is. Let me show you a little video. I'm Eric Radner and I'm Brent Bushnell, co-founders of 2-Bit Circus. And this is our Los Angeles workshop. We've set out to reimagine the carnival, the carnival of the future. The Steam Carnival is a modern traveling circus featuring high-tech games built with lasers, robots, and fire. It'll open in Los Angeles and travel to San Francisco next spring. We've already made a lot of fun games to inspire kids to pursue science, technology, engineering, art, and math, or Steam. We're raising money to finalize production, to secure locations, and to reach out to schools. Inventing new carnival games, coordinating mentors, and organizing a full, road-ready carnival takes resources. We've got great ways for the whole family to get involved, including special kits that kids can use to make their own futuristic entertainment and be part of the show. With the help of the community, we want to engage, entertain, and educate young minds all across the country. Tell all your friends support the Steam Carnival today. Thank you, and we'll see you at the Steam Carnival. Okay, how many of us look at that and think, oh my gosh, how cool is that? And how many of us know that we're going to have administrators or school board members or somebody who's going to say, what? Open flow? No way, no way. And I mean, that's what the modern maker movement is. It's just really, it's very cool, very interesting. By the way, drop into that YouTube link that I've got down there in the bottom and take a look at that video a little bit slower if you want to. But the modern maker movement is about getting back into hands-on building and developing persistence and grit, not only the grit for sticktutiveness, right, but also literally grit under our nails. And gosh, don't our kids need that? There's all sorts of affordable and maybe not so affordable hardware to get started. I'm going to let you go ahead and pause. Take a moment here. Google these terms. Check out their intro videos to each one of these and tell me if these aren't going to hook your kids. Absolutely, right? One of the best resources if you're interested in going in this direction with the best resources out there is a book called Invent to Learn with Sylvia Martinez, Gary Steger writing this. Their research is impeccable with this. Their ideas are solid. My colleague Kevin Honeycutt and I, when they first came out with this book, we dove right into it and we're so excited. We immediately saw the work that he and I had been doing for the past 10 years and the research that backed it up. So anybody asked, well, this maker space, what's the research behind it? Man, you better have this book at your fingertips. So if we have STEM and STEAM and we try to combine it with the maker movement, the old school, no child left behind era STEM with the hot new concepts of today, maker space. That's what I do. I combine these to where we can see how they come together and let's smash that stuff together to make what we're calling STEAMMAKER. It's a combination. It's a way for teachers to have trouble bridging that hot maker space area to see possibilities. But right now what I'm seeing is there's a gap. There's a gap that we're facing in innovation. We've got traditional teachers on one side and innovative jumpers on the right. Yeah? And the innovation teachers say, jump, jump, jump. And the more traditional minded teachers, man, they want to. They want to. And when the gaps were shorter and closer together, it's easy to make that hop, right? But each year, that gap continues to widen with each new innovation, with each new tool, with each new concept, with a new thought, it widens even further. And so the innovative teachers are yelling, jump, jump. And again, they want to do the right thing for their kids. They get excited. And when they jump, it's not always successful. They can't do it alone. They feel they can't and so they don't even try. And then we blame them. We could go ahead and blame them. Or we could build bridges. I love building bridges. I did it for PBL. And now we have what I think really is the great, the steam maker bridge between the STEM classroom and maker education. So I think steam maker moves us from the NCL, NCLB style STEM in a more engagement so teachers and students can find their way toward a more pure makerspace mentality. So let's jump right in. Our steam maker camp's a five day camp. It's 14 hour days. Now, this is because it was in the summer. It doesn't have to be that long all the time. But I wanted them, both the teachers and the students to really get submerged in the process. So where they would be almost forced to hit a wall, and then see their way through that. And yes, it's students and teachers coming together to learn. It's set for grades five through eight. Now I am working on a steam maker junior for the littles, right to see how and if anybody's working on that area right now for littles, I definitely would love to talk with you about that. But it's about again, merging that stem and maker ed. Our main goals. It's really about helping teachers see how to do the right thing. I really believe that teachers teach how they're taught. If we want lecture and teacher controlled learning, we should just run our pre service and professional learning that way. But if we went authentic learning, right? If we want teachers to learn how to let go of the reins, we have to role model and how they're learning. I want kids to know that learning is fun, and that they can do things without that permission to pee mentality that we forced on them. It's about them learning to know how to take charge. They can what they can learn, have fun, grow, fix it, do it. Absolutely. All of the above and more. So you see maker brings kids and teachers together as true co learners and collaborators and exchange mentors. If we want teachers to do good teaching and learning every day, they have to experience it as learners themselves. And they've got to do it with real kids in a real learning environment. When I first thought of building this bridge between stem and maker ed. I had no idea how to do it. And it's happening now it's happening. So let's talk details. In five days, strangers came together with a stranger. That's me. We had to start really small and we had to build a vision of possible. But I had to to build it and plan big because I didn't know who was coming to the table. I didn't know what their skills were. I'm going to guess that a lot of them didn't have a lot of practice and thinking and learning this way. But you never know who's going to jump in and go fast and really devour all you have planned. So I planned way bigger than I thought they would ever go. These are basic modules that we had. I hate that term modules. I don't like stations either. If you guys can think of a better, better term, please shoot that my way. But these are the things these are the locations modules, because that's what I'm going to call it. Where we had kids diving and learning and playing. So let's dive in now. What are the modules that we worked with fabrics and wearable technology? Had it set up at tables where the kids got a little introduction of what might be there. Every group experienced every single module. They got a quick taste. They got two, three hours to work there. And as they go there, they run across this, which you see on your screen right now, is a table tent. And they all had learned very basic skills. Here's here's the thing though, every single kid wanted to learn how to sew, not because here we're going to learn this stitch and then that stitch. And here's the basics of the machine and let's die. I didn't do that. I said, well, let's make a backpack. How about a gadget bag, something that you can that you can wear to hold your phone or your, or your fire can fire or whatever. And that's what they wanted to do. And so had to learn how to sew in order to build those. You'll see on there the sewing nerd on YouTube, I put together a playlist. She is a great person to watch. She makes sewing cool and fun. I will give you a warning though. She does have kind of a beverage, a beer or a drink with each, each particular thing she sews almost every single one of them. You should preview her videos before you put it on your playlist. I did edit out not edit the video, but I did not put everything that I wanted to on this playlist. But that being said, I talked to the kids and said, Hey, you know, this is what she does. We're not caring about that. We're moving forward. You got to do what your community will allow your mileage may vary, do the right thing for your kids in your community. But then you'll see once they've got the basics, now the level one challenges to build something they're proud of that's that's their push through that's where they're going now eventually we'll get to the level two challenges. But this is just kind of the introduction again, two, three hours per module. Let's take a look at what Anna had to say. And Anna's kind of quiet. So listen carefully and you might want to turn your sound completely up. Now you see her pause there because she remembered what she's in right now is we set up a little those of you who remember those reality shows where they have the confessional booth. I didn't want to call it confessional booth. We called it a self interview booth. And we set up an iPad on a music stand with really strong Velcro and the kids walked up and they just pushed record and when they were finished, they pushed stop and I encourage them to make 32nd videos or shorter. I wanted them very short and so you can see she's getting ready to make a second video to kind of tell how she did the thing. But look at her look at her face. She's so excited. She worked four to six not 46 four to six hours on this over to the right. You see her taking it to the next level. This is part of her level two challenge where she has mashed up sewing which she had never done before and then made a headband and she's mashing it up with a different module which you'll see here in a second where she would be bringing in technology now because this was only a five day camp. We weren't able to go as far as we wanted to imagine if this was a year round curriculum headbands nothing. What she tells it is this is a headband for people who are going through chemotherapy and given more time she wants to develop a temperature sensor so it can give her an alert as a whoever is going through chemotherapy have an alert are their temperature too high is it too low how are they feeling and just so they're aware of self diagnostics. Additionally something she was really in love with was the idea of aromatherapy. You push a button or two and depending on how you're feeling it dispenses certain sense to help you feel better whether it's nauseous or you can't sleep or or you're too sleepy sort of thing so need a little perk up. She was really excited about that she had a list of about ten different things that this headband would be able to do once she was able to dive in and start playing with the technology. Possibilities are endless y'all. Let's take a quick listen to Marshall who had about two hours to work on lyrics learn software and practice record and revise. Oh well apparently we're not going to listen to Marshall. There we go. If you want to mess with technology and change the world, see Megas is the place to go yeah. Ginger by my side helping me getting up on problems and figuring it out. To listen here's the order goes in. Hey, what's the problem and brainstorm. Test, test, test fail. Invite way and try try again. Present and come on down. Let's go. Let's go make the world a better place. Now Marshall is a seventh grader who learned the software and had never done anything like this ever before in his life. Imagine if he had maybe a year round program where he could really dive in and get better. So in the music producer module they really were given a choice of whether they could build instruments or just make music. Some kids kind of dabbled in both but we asked them to go one way or another so in their two to three hours they could really dig in a little bit deeper. Remember on these tents we're seeing the basic level one and two. Each group gets about that like I said three hours. Level two is where we're aiming for and you'll see those in a minute. These are two girls who learned the structure of music and storytelling. If you've ever had kids work with garage band or any other looping software they just smash a bunch of cool loops together and call it a song and it's not a song. So once they've done that then I asked them to listen to a song that they know and that they like and then look for and listen for repeats and for some continuity and see if it just has any similarities to what they put together and through that discovery process I can predict where they're gonna make mistakes and I let them make those mistakes and continue to revise them. Girls did a great job with their music too. I'd love to share it but just let me know if you want to hear some more of these examples. One of the more popular modules we had was our robotics. Again kids had all sorts of choices of whether they wanted to code and redesign a strand beast or if they wanted to do building and programming. What we have here is most kids chose to go with working with the hummingbird robot kit and we'll look at some examples. I do want to let you know that QR code will send you to my YouTube playlist of Theo Janssen's Strand Beast which is a wind-powered robot. This was giving kids the option to learn how to design these creatures who walk on their own in the wind. If you haven't had a chance if you're not familiar with the strong beast you have to check that out. As I said most of our kids went and decided to design, build and program with the hummingbird robotics. It's a great program, great tool. This group that you see right here made a lion because their mascot at their school is a lion and it roared and it responded to questions you would ask. Another team made a monkey. My little fourth and fifth grade students made a monkey. There was a duck that quacked and moved and flapped its wings and its eyes glowed red and then another group made a baby who cried, cooed and shook a rattle. This is not something that comes with the hummingbird robotics. The kit, the electronics do but you make it do what you want it to. And it really expands up. The kids use the visual programming model. Pretty quick plug-and-play. Took them about four hours to get one going but the actual thing itself that you are designing is all your own. Circuitry is a module that that holds a lot of the hardware that we see in a lot of makers places because they're affordable, it's fun, it's flexible. Again I want kids to know how these things work. If you're working with makey makey or little bits don't just put these things together and say ah it's cool. How does the circuitry work? Why does it work that way? And you'll see on my level one challenge there. They could choose between the challenge A or challenge B. I wanted them to know how that circuitry works in our own homes. We're not just putting together toys here y'all. Here's a set of kids who were just beginning and starting to make their own. It's always, little bits is always so fun. They can start, kids can start really small with a five minute win to doing a huge cool stuff with our Duino and Wi-Fi and you really really need to look up little bits. Other things that you might use inside that type of module? Again feel free to pause and google these. You're going to fall in love. Teachers and students are like you just learned so much and if you can have a mentor come in who really knows electricity well your kids will play get hooked and then that mentor can really push them with the great high-tech vocabulary and other challenges. I recommend that. The most popular module for sure was the 3d modeling and printing. Kids want to print and I hooked them by letting them as they came in things were printing already but you know I mean right? I show them the things being printed on the 3d printer but I didn't let them print anything until they had actually learned to build a model. They have to build before they get to print and there are all sorts of different pieces of hardware that you can use with that. We love our maker bot 3d printers. There's a whole variety. These are a little bit expensive so if you're looking to to get a big wow there you are but I will say that it's just one small piece of a good Whitmaker space. Other things that you want to include with that are your your model makers. Autodesk is really a great place to start. Very affordable I think. Free right? Thingiverse is a library of things that people have models that people have made and you can just print straight from those print what other people have done or you can download theirs edit it up change it around mod it and then reupload and print or or upload your own original designs which I want my kids to do. I don't want them to just steal other people's ideas and call it theirs. I want them to make their own and so I like to get them started on SketchUp. It's got a very low learning curve to it. There is some adjustment that to change the format of the files from SketchUp that goes over to the maker bots but it's doable. It's something that your kids really get hooked into and both the teachers and the students had a tough time really making something that in a two three-hour time period two or three period time period but again in this level one they were going to every module and testing it before then they were able to dive into their own choices in level two. Let's take a listen to what these girls had to say. So I'm Lily and I'm Lauren. I was just at both just at the 3D printing center and it was so cute because I finally got mine done and then they're already printing mine. I said there has to be smaller because otherwise I would have enough time to make it so here is the small little heart from them because I'm making them come in and cute and for those of you who know what they are you know they're awesome. Thank you. So um yeah it's pretty awesome. Lauren tell about your experience. I am good. I thought it was really fun except I didn't have enough time to print I'm not the most experienced person in that monical favorite of all of them. Lauren may have deleted her doghouse. A good day I guess. She may have deleted her doghouse but she was back in and building it again. Are you tired of having kids turn in halfway done projects or are only giving a half effort? What is it you're asking them to do? How are you hooking them in? Absolutely love these kiddos right? So what you've seen is just the bare bones of basics so far. Each group got about like I said two to three hours at each module. It was a taste. It was a warm-up. It was it was a lead-up to do this. This is what I'm really getting kids to do. This is level one learning in a full-time program but in a camp of five days this was our level two. I had to stretch the kids beyond just the ooze and oz of doing a quick thing but I needed to give them that quick thing so they could have a quick win because if I handed them this to begin with the quality isn't as high. Again I walk them up to more difficult things. I stretch them beyond and in this process of leveling up the teachers get reminded of the purpose of education with this level two. Maybe that's not the purpose of schooling but that's the purpose of education is to do good things for the world. So what other possible modules can we put into a steam maker camp? It's infinitely flexible. What else can we add that's cool fun that's learning and again high quality mentors will take the learning further. As a social studies teacher I'm actually at an advantage in this STEM type of program because I don't know and I don't even try to think that I know. This is one of those that I rely on connecting with the community and then the community sees what we're doing and begins to value it because they're an integral part. If I was a science or a tech or a math teacher I might think that I could do more and not need to rely on the community as much. Something to ponder. People always ask about the consumables and the hardware and the costs. My biggest tip is first of all go to makershed. They've got a great list of stuff you probably want to have. Of course your modules will need to be specific but then have some other stuff in general. Biggest tip buy inexpensive tools. Now not the ones that are just going to break instantly but not your top of the line because a lot of people want to deck out on top of the line. What happens is kids use these and break them because they're still learning. I like to have one or two top of the line pieces so that as they're learning they can break the cheap ones but if they really are good and have delved in they've they've earned the right to use the more professional level type of tools whether it's a camera or if we go to a table saw yes a table saw. Not everybody gets to go to that. You got to earn your licks on the handsaws and the hacksaws first. If you would like go ahead and pause and read these right here because overall this is why kids love not just steam maker camp but they they love all hands on learning by doing. That's what this is about. Parents and administrators during the summer were actually Facebooking me and teachers have even stayed in contact with me over the the duration of this year and and and on I'm sure and they're telling me about how they're remodeling and reviewing how they're approaching teaching and learning with their kids. See the kids in this were just the props. Remember this is about professional learning. I did this so that teachers could see how to redo their classroom. I can tell you about learning by doing and makerspace. It's not the same as being in there and being a learner. Remember steam makers about teachers learning. Kids are side benefit right. If you're interested in this you want to learn more about doing some maker education maker space steam maker camps for yourself. I do I do own the steam maker camp brand but you probably listening to this video or probably part of the choir you can dig in yourself. You can learn. Visit these websites. Follow these hashtags on Twitter. Get connected with other teachers. There are a lot out there who are doing this. Develop your own and grow. You can. I did. It's the steam maker mentality right. If this is what something you're looking about thinking about doing get yourself get your team together and ponder these questions after you watch this presentation. No further. What else do we need? If you have questions or you want to know more about me or steam maker camp let's get connected. I love to help teachers, leaders, schools, community rethink what education can really be. Thanks for listening.