DAVID DUTTON
Lym didn’t do any of this after school, on his own time. Quite
the opposite. Bellarmine integrated a DIY environment—a
makerspace—into its regular curriculum so that imaginative and
ambitious students like Lym, tomorrow’s creative technology
leaders, can flourish in regular-hour programs that encourage and
reward initiative.
At his school, and at numerous other college prep campuses in
the South Bay, spare rooms and closets and assorted empty areas
are being reconfigured as do-it-yourself, hands-on centers for experiential
learning. Makerspaces and fablabs aren’t new, but they
have become a hot item in the educational community. They put
screen learning and classroom technology into action to enable
students to put theory and imagination into practice.
“I’m fortunate to have a makerspace,” says Lym. “In other classes,
there’s nothing where you can express yourself, your values.
Students are pressured to fit into molds. You have to one-up everyone,
have your testosterone pumping, be No. 1 in academics.
Here, I use creativity to make solutions to problems like chipped
ping-pong paddles and limited pocket money.” To Lym it was a
challenge, not a setback, that his fellow students were reluctant to
fork up the cash for store-bought paddle replacements. “I’ll just
make them myself,” Lym decided. And he did just that.
Now he’s working on an athletic shoe in the school’s makerspace.
His research involves testing the response of fabric samples
to stress and environmental impact. “I’m figuring out how I can
reduce the carbon footprint in producing a shoe.” There’s shipping,
fabrication waste production, toxic glues and, he says, inefficient
molding processes. “I’m looking to get rid of all that excess.”
While its origins are still being debated, the general consensus
is that makerspaces—a byproduct of the maker movement—were
launched by bringing together the DIY and hacker cultures. The
movement has been around in various forms for a few decades,
but has recently gained momentum as it enters mainstream school
curriculums as an accepted form of active learning. It’s the educational
intersection where design meets engineering, and dreamy
ingenuity meets pragmatic implementation.
In a world where 3-D scanners and printers are now readily
available, makerspaces are an ideal environment for innovation.
Early on in his Media Lab, pioneering computer scientist
Seymour Papert and his colleagues at MIT helped launch the
movement, first focused on using computers as instruments for
childrens’ learning. Since the 1980s his experiments have been
expanded upon by thousands of researchers and educators worldwide.
Today in the South Bay Paulo Blikstein, Stanford University’s
Transformative Learning Technologies Lab (TLTL) director,
is one of the country’s prime movers.
According to Blikstein, an MIT grad, the ultimate litmus test
for the maker movement’s viability is whether or not it leads to
long-term, data-backed educational improvements. Studies show
the results are multidimensional. Ideally, students learn a variety
of computational skills including robotics and real-life technology,
like the engineering and design behind elevator doors with
In a world where 3-D scanners and printers are now readily available,
makerspaces are an ideal environment for innovation.
BELLARMINE
COLLEGE
PREPARTORY
Student Jordan
Lym with his
parents and the
prototype for his
high tech athletic
shoe during an
open house.