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staffer who is a roofing expert is advising them,” says Dohmen.
A capital campaign for building a central hub location is in the
permit process and funding stages. The “red tape” doesn’t stop the
momentum behind projects that have students studying anatomy
while designing prosthetic limbs, or math classes calculating and
constructing a reduced-scale replica of a real-life tower. Shoe boxes
placed on campus collect notes with hundreds of problems the
students categorize into “off campus,” “too big,” “solvable” and
other designations.
“On the track surrounding the playground, bike riders were
running into walkers,” says Dohmen. “They painted green strip
crosswalks to solve the problem. Another problem: A teacher
needed a box for scratch paper. They made one with great joinery.”
At the Palo Alto-based all-girls Castilleja School, eighth-grade
teacher Heather Pang works with her colleagues to integrate
maker practices into classroom curriculum. Faculty members
participate in professional development workshops and actively
support students in the Bourn Idea Lab, named in memory of
Doug Bourn, Castilleja’s longtime robotics team mentor. Occasionally,
an outside “expert tinkerer” is invited. “We’re in Silicon
Valley, so why wouldn’t we call on mentors from the technology
industry?” asks Pang rhetorically. She participated at Stanford in
a Fellows program initiated by Blikstein’s TLTL that consists of a
group of expert educators from all over the world who contribute
to maker and digital fabrication culture through research and an
open-source curriculum.
A makerspace 18th Century Cities project at Castilleja has
students learning about time period economies, class divisions
and religious practices while constructing a complete colonial era
model of Williamsburg, Va. A recent project in an English class
involved artistic interpretations of novels. “They developed a
scene from the novel. They made a book that opened up to have
butterflies fly out of it,” Pang remembers.
While the effect of laser-cut butterflies suspended on jewelry
wire was magical, Pang’s personal favorite was the “Monuments
to Women in Washington, D.C.” project that originated from
class discussions about women being underrepresented in public
monuments. “Let’s build some,” was the creative solution.
At all of the schools, the best scenarios have students and
teachers learning, failing and succeeding together. Kindergarteners
given Legos take more risks and explore; older students make representational
constructions, tear them apart, then think to remake
them from a new angle or with different materials. “If the teacher
has all the answers in a makerspace, it’s not going well,” says Pang.
“Instead, the students should be coming up with the answers. A
good prompt from a teacher is worth everything in a makerspace.”
When two boys working on a prosthetic arm asked Dohmen
for a straw with which they planned to fill a balloon with air to
create enough tension for the arm to lift a tin can, she had doubts.
Surprisingly, the idea worked. Dohmen was taught the value of
allowing kids to question, attempt and fail, make a mess—or
find success.
What is the optimum age for instituting maker programs? Proponents
agree it is never too early. Children, even before they are
able to speak, are masters at manipulating objects. Their tactile interaction
fuels neural development and connectivity. “The whole
point is to get from screen to real product,” Dutton says. “There’s
a neural extension to your hands from the brain. To allow students
to make something designed on the screen with their hands and
fail; it teaches them something.” Furthermore, in a world where
Amazon or Google make it easy to think of a product and buy it,
the arc of transforming a virtual idea into physical reality results
in self- or team-satisfaction. For this benefit alone, educators say
maker activities in their programs are weighted heavily toward
hands-on, collaborative work, not solo screen time.
Gender inequities are the monster in the closet for Silicon Valley
tech companies, among other industries. When asked about girls’
involvement in STEM-centric maker activities, program leaders
CASTILLEJA SCHOOL
Sixth grade science
students create interactive
devices in the
Bourn Idea Lab using
the Arduino platform
and the Scratch programming
language.