FabPlay Summer Institute was held June 25-27 at Hawken School and about 25 #Maker Educators from the area came to make and learn. Nick DiGiorgio and Anna Delia were the organizers and I am glad they did since we were not having a second #EdcampNEOmaker (like we did last year in August). There were some sessions and lots of making with various Fab Lab/MakerSpace tools.
We started out making right away. We had 1 ½ hours to make our conference name tag and t-shirt. The equipment available was a couple of laser cutters, two vinyl cutters, two Cricuts, heat press, an embroidery machine, and students silk screening a FabPlay logo.
Jodie Ricci got us thinking by talking to us about Maker Centered Learning and Teaching. Making is dispositional, personal, habits of mind. Teaching looks like facilitating, redirecting authority, co inspirational. Classrooms looks at tools materials access and visibility. A large gap for students is they are not sensitive to the design dimensions of the world. Technology has closed off design. We no longer see that “things come apart”. Besides the Maker Centered Learning book, she also mentioned Creating Cultures of Thinking and Making Thinking Visible as good resources.
We then broke into two groups based on level of knowledge/experience in FabLabs/MakerSpaces. My group was creating a big flow chart/venn diagram/ outline of resources for various aspects of FabLab/Maker. It is rough and a work in progress. Nick would like to be able to make one that is public and clickable and editable. At lunch, Sonya Prior Jones spoke to us about theFab Lab Foundation. After lunch, we broke into 3 maker sessions (beginner laser cutter, design software logo making, circuits). Anna then went over to the Elementary School and opened her lab for a tour. Then we rounded out the day with dinner and bocci at Pinstripes in Orange Village.
Day 2 started with some general making again (vinyl cutter, 3D printer, circuits, coding….). We broke into 3 groups for sessions. Cory Rice and I did one on tech toys/coding/robotics. The other two sessions were CNC with Shopbot and vinyl cutter and embroidery. Jermeny Shorr talked to us at lunch about TIES and things going on in NE Ohio. After that you could go to the woodshop to make a “wonky robot” (pencil holder) or work with Arduinos. The final session had choices of cardboard automata, 3D design and printing, and computational thinking. We shared our work from the day, then had dinner and open lab for 2 hours.
Day 3 was open lab, lunch and sharing. I did most of my open making on the laser cutter. I wanted to make some gears, make a light box, and cut a Snoopy. This also gave me more time to work with Corel Draw. We are hoping to create a network of #Maker educators that collaborate (so I started a blog to share info NEOmakerEDU) . We hope to have a meetup in 6 months, then FabPlay again June 2020. We need more of these #Maker meetups, now to get something going in Summit County...
all of my pictures are below
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Finally went to an Akron area education conference, #APS3T (Teach Tech Transform) in mid June. Eric Sheninger was the keynote and I tweeted out many of his ideas (under the conference hashtag). He is a great presenter with a great message of how education can be better. He speaks from the heart about how he became a better educator. His books are good reads.
For the first session, I checked out some Makey-Makey work by Katelyn Koppelberger. Her students do storytelling, presentations, voice recording and using other sound clips. Then I saw a show in the planetarium, and went to learn about Girls who Code from Hannah Simon Goldman. I just wanted to hear more about GWC from someone working for them. It is a good program and now they have some money that people can apply for to purchase more resources Day two started with Jamie Donally giving us lots of ideas about AR & VR in learning. I caught the beginning of Michael Vaughn’s session about making better presentations by designing them with a focus on how our brain works. “We know what good design looks like, but we don’t often see it.” He wants us to start with two questions : “what is my point” and “why does it matter”. Then I caught some of Laurie Greens Maker session. She was taking people through some hands on making and talking about what content they were doing with those builds. She went from low tech to mid tech to high tech, showing that maker and learning can be done with common supplies to expensive machines. I ran into Jeff Gargas and Rae Hugart (first time irl) while they were recording a hallway podcast with Chelsea (??). They are part of the Teach Better Team putting on a conference in Cuyahoga Falls in November. I was presenting a session on Physical Computing with the micro:bit . It only attracted 2 energetic learners. They were both new to coding, and we got their “hands dirty” with some starter coding and wiring. Amy Rudd is an APS teacher who had a session “Robot Bistro” that also only attracted 2 teachers. We are wondering why we both attracted so few to sessions that should appeal to educators (other than there were other good sessions at the same time). I hope to be collaborating with Amy in the future. I think #APS3T is a good conference at a good venue (Firestone CLC) and I feel it could become more regional if promoted that way. It was mostly APS teachers and admins. This was the third year for the conference. I am a month behind on my postings. Been to several conferences and need to get to writing about them...
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