The Digital MakerSpace Toolkit

The age of access created a richer education environment where learning scaffolds on itself and on the billions of resources that teachers and students have at their fingertips! We can now explore learning with a variety of programs and means, each with its amazing experiences and supports for types of learner, subject matter, remediation and acceleration.

Let’s add to the mix global learning, collaboration, communication and social emotional learning. By bringing them into all our classrooms, regardless of subject, we allow our students to unleash their creativity, make connections and explore their own learning. Learning then happens naturally, and the students’ personality and affinities come to support their full circle. The best way to spur authentic learning is to give our students a real cause to learn that can make them feel useful, proud of themselves and encourage them to continue.

A great opportunity for teachers to engage all of the above is partnering with Enabling the Future, a non-profit that crowdsources prosthetics for children in need. They connect globally or locally classrooms with children in need, and provide the teachers and students with the technical piece of the puzzle. The classrooms could then Skype with the children who need prosthetics (their client), get to know them, provide them with an essential and vital product that will make their life much easier, and make learning personal and relevant. All you’d need is a 3D printer and your students’ desire to help. For more information on how your class or school can visit Enabling the Future’s website.

If we look closer we can see how seemingly abstract programs come together to provide a bridged approach to understanding and application to real life. They are the also the fastest and easiest way to build critical thinking skills which we strive to build in our life-long learner. They are relevant to our students because they happen through discovery learning based on curiosity, empathy and inquiry. Together, they bridge school learning with real-life scenarios, providing a finality to school-based activities that enables the students to understand their own learning and decide on their learning path. They are the digital makerspace toolkit. Here is how the new programs connect to each other:

1. PBL (project based learning) brings with it multi-disciplinary collaboration and increases the students' understanding of how subjects really play a part in real life and build upon each other.

2. STEM and STEAM explore engineering by leveraging the Sciences and Math to enable computational thinking; they help students bring to life abstract concepts and express their understanding via use of Technology and Arts.

3. Robotics as an extension of STEM/STEAM comes to provide the students with the means for expression, translating subject matter into tangible, student created objects.

4. Coding uses all the elements and principles of linguistics: words, punctuation and numbers, are constructed using syntax and phraseology patterns to enable the students to talk to the machines. Just like reading, coding is a means for learning, rather than a subject, and like any other foreign language, it opens the door to understanding other worlds while building the students' critical thinking, organizational, project management. Coding allows the students to connect STEM/STEAM with Robotics as a natural extension of PBL

5. 3D printing allows the Maker Spaces to connect traditional hands-on learning with the computer generated and online experiences. It helps the students understand how an abstract product can become reality. It encourages their creativity while developing their critical thinking skills and forces them to develop and employ project management and computational thinking through its cause-effect impact. If the student create a product and after printing it they realize that it cannot be assembled, they are forced to rethink their process, engage in backwards design, and troubleshoot. They become able to translate an abstract idea into a real-life object and visualize their thinking. They can now understand, connect and drive their own their learning. While learning evolves digitally in many new forms, at the end of the day true learning is the one that makes sense to the learner. What better learning experience that can engage the whole school than providing a human being with the essentials of a better life? We are preparing our students for future jobs that have not even yet been invented. It makes sense to help them figure out how to be ready for them.