So, Why Are We Even Doing This?

MakerEd is not, repeat, not shop class. We are not (not!) training people how to build things with their hands so they can go out and build those things for a living. We are teaching them how to think. We are teaching them the same traditional things, math, social studies, science, etc., that we always have. We’re just doing it in a way that allows the learning to persist beyond standardized testing.

Automation has displaced millions of workers over the past generation. In recent years, half of those displaced workers have exited the workforce, never to work again. This means that more of our students, than has been the case for the last century, will have no jobs at all.

"Approximately 25 percent of U.S. employment (36 million jobs in 2016) will face high exposure to automation in the coming decades (with greater than 70 percent of current task content at risk of substitution)."

Muro, Maxim, Whiton, Hathaway

Automation and Artificial Intelligence

Brookings Institution

January, 2019

We must avoid becoming "product fixated." If a student fails to complete a project, but showed excellence in the design of a portion or component, we should consider giving more weight to that subset. Individualized education is inherently "unfair" in the traditional sense – that is it is not equal, it is equitable. Students' ability to push through failure, collaborate, adapt and synthesize are far more important than an end-of-the-unit widget.

So what we’re doing is training people to live. We’re training people to deal with the challenges in life that we cannot predict. We’re training people to analyze and solve problems that no one has thought of. We're training them to become the fellow citizens that we all need.

CREATE and the art of growth

All of us are born makers and innovators. Just have a conversation with a five-year-old. Their sense of the world has not been solidified or limited by experience. Everything is possible. Our kindergarteners are new to our school and to CREATE. Creating nine kinds of pies with a purple crayon is totally plausible to a five-year-old.

For the past 100+ years, the traditional school system has been about suppressing innovation in favor of standardized knowledge. Students were the output of a system intended to "manufacture" factory workers. "Creative" workers were a problem in a system where every human component was supposed to be interchangeable. Creating learners who could grow independently was simply not part of the plan.

To many people, school is about preparing learners for "21st century jobs." Yet, there is no way that we can know what those jobs are. 10 years ago, I could not have described my job. It didn't exist. It is the heights of hubris and arrogance to think that we know what the jobs of 15 years from now will be.

Failed 3-D print.

So we take a different approach to learning here.

An engineer is somebody who uses their mind to solve problems in real life. Technology is a thing invented via the engineering and design process to solve problems. Our makerspace, CREATE, is where those things come together.

But we're not an engineering principles class. We encourage students to not only define their own techniques, we ask them to define their own goals. CREATE's culture is deliberately built as a safe place for failure — and learning by analyzing those failures. Questions like "Why didn't it do what I want?" and "How can I change it to make it better?" are the background music that indicates learning success.

We can't reliably guess where our students will end-up. So we must provide them not only with the techniques to learn anything, but with the confidence that they can do anything.

Aspirations, not standards

Integrating MakerEd into education has to honor the expectation of benchmarks, if not standards. Even though I've been really plugged-in to social media for decades, I couldn't find a list of maker skill progressions anywhere. So, with the help of people all over the country, I made a Maker Skills Progression Google Sheet. It's a living document that still has some gaps. Please feel free to comment on it.

This rubric is a spectrum of mastery levels for particular skills. In other words, "Once you do this, then you can aim at this." It’s a tool for teachers to encourage progress, regardless of a specific student's starting point. It can be used for any age. For example, I’m probably a Level B in sewing and a Level D in soldering. We should not expect, let alone require, students to be all Es in all skills.

These aren't standards. (Not standards!) They are aim points and guides for individual classroom teachers. It should be perfectly acceptable for a given student to be a Level B in one skill and an E in another. The rubrics are strictly aspirational. Origami and 3-D design do not have to be for everybody.

Once students are at Level E, then that skill is just a tool they’re good with. After that, it’s totally about their content — what they make and its educational validity.

As a teacher, the levels let you know what quality level of craftsmanship to expect from a student. Theoretically, a student with B-level skills and a student with E-level skills could both get graded highly on a given project — if they have great content. Conversely, a student with E-level skills could get a low grade if they didn’t work up to their known level of craftsmanship.

It's a challenge to educate the profession that this is not a continuation of the way we’ve always done things. If a teacher is looking for standards boxes to check off, then we have not done our job right in educating them about how maker education works. Traditionally trained teachers often look for checkbox standards and we need to head them off. Early childhood development experts, physicians and occupational therapists can identify what specific hand-eye coordination and manipulative benchmarks are appropriate for a given age. Those evaluations lie outside of mainstream maker ed.

Learning to "ROAR"

CREATE(ing) time

If you ask any teacher what one thing that they need more of (besides money) they will tell you that they need more time. We found a way to "create" more time for teachers without diminishing the students' classroom experience. For a week each month, we bring in substitute teachers for each grade level per day and send their students on an all-day rotation through STEAM activities. The teachers spend the entire day on professional development and prep time.

Making Sacrifices

Sacrificial workbench tops

Wear and tear is one of the things built into our workbenches. Students will cut without mats, scraping-up hot glue damages the work surfaces. In other words: School happens. So the tops of our workbenches are sacrificial. Every year or two, we rip them off (they're attached with a minimum of silicone glue) and replace them with new tops.

Old bench top about to be replaced. New surface is visible in the rear.

Our original tabletops were a thin white plastic designed to be attached to a wall. But it was so thin, that when the temperature in the room changed, the material warped and made for an uneven work surface. The second version was whiteboard paneling, but the white surface was too thin to withstand day-to-day punishment (see photo above.)

Our current version is fused laminate board, designed for custom cabinets. It's actually donated scrap from a local company, which they generously cut to the exact size for us. As of this writing, it's been in use for five months and is standing up very well.

Links

Workbench Plans

Original surface (bad)

Donated sheets of thermal fused laminate board