Director: Janice Felton

Characteristics of Maker Space Learning

Maker Space lessons emphasize a new way of teaching and learning that focuses on hands-on inquiry and open-ended exploration. It allows students with diverse interests, abilities, and experience to develop skills they will need in the 21st-century workforce.

The focus of Maker Space learning is to empower students to be active participants in their learning by providing tools to help them solve problems in creative and innovative ways, while encouraging them to take the lead in their learning. The maker movement is about teaching and learning that is focused on student centered inquiry. This is not the project done at the end of a unit of learning, but the actual vehicle and purpose of the learning. The time to change education is needed now more than ever.

The focus of STM's Maker Space is to use the design thinking process to anchor all projects. The engineering design process emphasizes open-ended problem solving and encourages students to learn from failure. This process nurtures students’ abilities to create innovative solutions to challenges in any subject! This will give students real-world opportunities to practice.

The Maker Space lessons are designed to:

* Stimulate the curiosity and interest of both girls and boys

* Emphasize hands-on, inquiry-based learning

* Stress collaborative teamwork

* Involve the engineering design process

In Computer class, 1st-grade students turned Ozobot into a pollinator to create an interactive model of a flower garden to demonstrate how animals help with pollination. Then students collect data about the flowers pollinated and graph the results.

Ozobot Pollinates Almond Plants.

Cotton Plants

Students engage with new knowledge by following a process that includes generating products that illustrate learning. Students adapt, communicate, and exchange learning products with others in a cycle that includes:

Interacting with content presented by others,

2. Providing constructive feedback.

3. Acting on feedback to improve, and

4. Sharing products with an authentic audience. Learners demonstrate empathy and equity in knowledge building within the global learning community by seeking interactions with a range of learners.

Learners identify collaborative opportunities by developing new understandings through engagement in a learning group. Learners work productively with others to solve problems by soliciting and responding to feedback from others. Learners actively participate with others in learning situations by actively contributing to group discussions. Learners construct new knowledge by persisting through self-directed pursuits by tinkering and making. Learners develop through experience and reflection by iteratively responding to challenges.

From the National School Library Standards for Learners .... https://standards.aasl.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/180206-AASL-framework-for-learners-2.pdf

Computational Thinkers

Innovative Designer

Design Challenge

Introduction to Design Thinking - Identify the Problem

Wrong-way driving is a serious problem because of the high speeds usually involved since the result is more likely a head-on collision. In the United States, about 355 people are killed each year in crashes caused by drivers headed in the wrong direction on the highway. Students use the design thinking process to come up with a solution to this problem.