“Oficina Criativa” – Design in Public Schools
Renata Paraense V. de Lima
PDF | “Oficina Criativa” is a project that aim helping students to think and execute creative solutions. The objective is to empower kids since kindergarten and make them see that they are capable of coming up with relevant solutions and projects by themselves. During this classes, kids think and discuss ideas and solutions, they learn how to work together in order to accomplish what they want. They work mainly with disposable materials to create their prototypes and sometimes, their final products.
A Professional Development Experience to Rekindle the Passion for Learning in Makerspaces of the Public Unified Educational Centers (CEUs) in São Paulo, Brazil
Juliana Ragusa
PDF | The present work will discuss and share the practices and results of a maker educator’s professional development course led by me as the educational design manager and the founders of MundoMaker in partnership with the Municipal Secretariat of Education of São Paulo, for the piloting makerspaces located in the Unified Educational Centers (CEUs) of the Municipality of São Paulo. There were 15 participants, including technology educators and coordinators of the program.
MundoMaker is a private company focused on unleashing the student’s and educator’s full potential to better understand the relationship among themselves, their peers (society) and the world (represented by the maker practices and how one can act upon the world, design and change it). Through Constructionist and Holistic Education, MundoMaker offers intracurricular Maker program for K-12 schools, extracurricular programs and educator’s formation for both public and private schools in many areas of Brazil, with profit and non-profit pactices. Our programs are aligned with the Brazilian National Level Benchmarks (BNCC) and our socioemotional development Matrix.
Arandu Project: Engineering Applied to Basic Education Based on a MAKER and STEM Perspective
Claudia Celeste Celestino, Claudia De Oliveira Lozada, Leandro Baroni and Rafael Barreto Simões
PDF | The ARANDU project was created in 2016 with the objective of applying engineering project to high school and the 9th year of elementary school with the construction of CanSat. It has support from the Pro-Rectory of Extension and Culture of the Federal University of ABC because it is a project of Brazilian extension that brings students from Basic Education to the University. The theoretical and practical classes are supervised by professors of Aerospace Engineering and taught at the Federal University of ABC by students of Aerospace Engineering. It adopts a maker perspective once the students construct the artifacts to carry out the experiments and the methodology STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disseminated by the educational projects of NASA (STEM Lessons From Space). It has stimulated several young people to follow careers in the Engineering courses and also attracted the interest of the students by the Space Sciences.
Catalyzing a Student-Centered Learning Culture Shift in Schools
Rodrigo Rodrigues da Silva, Renata Paraense Vianna de Lima, Artur Câmara Moreira and Jean Pierre Kreninski Lustosa Z. Menezes
PDF | Makerspaces, hackerspaces, medialabs and fablabs are inspiring novel student-centered learning environments in schools around the world. This report aims to share experiences, challenges and lessons learned from implementing non-traditional curricular subjects in the creative learning spaces at a school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The authors consist of a team of designers, engineers and programmers that lead makerspace and coding classes at a bilingual, Brazilian, privately held, for-profit day school. As educators, we believe in providing learning environments that emphasize collaboration, autonomy and curiosity.
Our everyday experiences, dotted with hands-on project strategies, student engagement, project- based learning, celebration and public display of student work, will be discussed, with a special focus on assessment as a tool to empower the desired culture shift among students. Afterwards, we will wrap up with reflections and future challenges in our field of work. Targeted at educators willing to implement such strategies or with ongoing experiences in their respective schools.
Circles of Inventions
Paola Salmona Ricci, Rita Junqueira de Camargo and Simone Kubric Lederman
PDF | The Program “Rodas de Invenções” (Circles of Inventions – CoI), an initiative by the Brazilian non-profit Instituto Catalisador , began as a constructionist activity in public libraries in Brazil where, after reading sessions, children engaged in the creation of meaningful personal narratives through the construction of artifacts to be played with and shared. Today, the program has evolved to include diverse non-formal educational spaces as well as schools. In a world with growing social and environmental challenges, the framework and Catalyst Kit developed for Circles of Inventions allows for a maker-centered learning practice that fosters the thinking and sharing of narratives, ideas and 3 dimensional drafts related to local and global issues, in a culturally responsive, purposeful, meaningful and personal way, while also connecting students from different backgrounds in public space. The audience who has participated in CoI in the last three years has been diverse and has included Kindergarteners, primary and secondary school students, educators, school leaders and administrators, librarians and others. The CoI framework and the program as a whole draws significant inspiration from the Project Zero Agency by Design framework, from Mitchel Resnick’s Creative Learning pillars: Projects, Peers, Passion and Play, and from the concept of Educating Cities.
Designing Robots for Social Change: Exploring a Jr. High Human-Centered Robotics Curriculum
Andrea Gomoll, Rebecca Hillenburg, Cindy Hmelo-Silver and Selma Šabanović
PDF | Our submission describes a human-centered and problem-based robotics curriculum in a rural Midwest community, which asks students to design robots that address social needs in their local communities. In the most recent iteration of this curriculum, junior high students (ages 13-14) worked with design clients in their school to design robots that addressed social and emotional needs (e.g., patrolling hallways during school lockdowns). The most important lesson we’d like to share with fellow educators from our experience with this unit is the benefit of engaging community stakeholders and emphasizing user-centered design and feedback, which created a more authentic problem-based learning experience for students that was ultimately transformational for them, their teacher, and their school community.
Driving Innovation: The Maker Mobile Initiative
Jennifer Flanagan and Caitlin Quarrington
PDF | college-based member programs who annually inspire over 250,000 youth in 500 communities in hands-on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) experiences. The Maker Mobile Initiative, launched in 2017, engages youth (Grades 6-12) from across Canada in hands-on exploration and making, fostering problem-solving and innovation. Furthermore, this model of makerspace helps reach youth traditionally underrepresented in STEM, in particular Indigenous youth and youth in rural and remote locations.
Ideate, Evaluate and Share – An Innovation Process Model for Educators
Raini Sipilä, Kati Sormunen and Tiina Korhonen
PDF | The Innokas Network encourages schools to develop innovative approaches for teaching their students 21st century skills, by arranging training, providing consultation and hosting events in different parts of Finland. At the FabLearn conference, we would like to introduce our innovation process, which is a semi-structured maker-activity model, designed for use in cross-disciplinary maker-projects geared towards classrooms with a wide range of ages and ability levels. We will describe how teachers were trained to use the model and provide a few examples of how the innovation process was used to increase environmental and communal responsibility in the classroom.
Impact of Digital Fabrication on Refugee Youth
Roy Ombatti
PDF | I work in a for-profit start-up that mainly seeks to lower barriers of access to 3D printing technology. We do this by building the machines from recycled electronic waste parts and other locally available materials. We believe in leveraging the power of technology for good and we also believe that the world’s youth should learn and take advantage of this 21st century skill in order to solve the world’s complex problems and prepare for tomorrow’s jobs. As such we teach how to make with a focus on 3D printing and digital fabrication coupled with human centered design in order to nurture the next generation of problems solvers. We conduct workshops and training sessions depending on each context and mostly in partnership with like-minded organizations. This paper is focused on a workshop we conducted in Athens, Greece this year in collaboration with MIT d-lab and Faros (local NGO) and funded by UNHCR. The workshop, dubbed the ‘Digital Design Fabrication Workshop’ taught digital fabrication skills to unaccompanied refugee youth aged between 9 and 17 years old. The youth were taught basic computing, basic CAD, design thinking, 3D printing and 3D printer fabrication.
Our biggest takeaway from this experience is the immediate transformation we noticed in the kids. The refugees were initially very apprehensive and generally had a foul attitude towards learning ‘difficult’ things or taking on new challenges. Given their tumultuous past, they generally shunned circumstances where failure was an option. After imparting just a few skills and showing the youth that they are indeed able and capable, the transformation was profound.
Maker Ed in the Art Studio Preparing Pre-service Artist/Educators to Integrate Maker Education Into P-12 Art Studio/Classrooms
Andrea Kantrowitz
PDF | This paper presents a model for preparing pre-service artist/educators to integrate digital and analog materials and methods in P-12 art studio/classrooms. Over the past three years, as part of a pre-certification art education program, I redesigned and taught a course, Learning in Digital Visual Cultures (DVC.) Art teacher candidates with little to no previous knowledge of digital tools, circuits or coding learn to adapt these new methods and materials borrowed from maker education to suit the learning objectives of the art studio. This approach flips the popular STEAM approach: technology is put at the service of art education, rather than art being used to enhance STEM education. The arts prioritize conceptual and material exploration in the service of personal meaning-making and aesthetic expression. In DVC, staples of the maker movement, such as simple circuits, Arduino and Scratch coding, are used to expand students’ personal engagement, arts learning and connections across the curriculum. Pre-service artist/educators study the history and current potential of digital visual cultures in art and education. They research and present on contemporary artists who incorporate digital technology in their work, and design lesson plans that use these artists as mentors.
Makerspace for Entrepreneurship for Identity
Sarah Emerson
PDF | The makerspace I run is in a K-6 public school setting. Of our 750 students, roughly half will have the opportunity for extended learning opportunities in my makerspace through projects I develop and facilitate with my students’ needs and interests at the forefront of my planning. I would like to share reflections on one of the elective classes I teach in this makerspace, which I have been teaching for the past 4 years. The elective class is titled Manufacturing & Entrepreneurship, and I would like to share how the makerspace made way for an entrepreneurship course to develop organically and how that course has been designed to help my 6th grade students discover, develop and share their identities with their community and the world. I will share about how students learn to run a real business, how students learn to design, market, and sell products that people want to buy, and how students have learned that they have the power to create and set a value for things they make. I will also share educator takeaways from the experience of teaching an entrepreneurship class in a makerspace, with a focus on resources for designing a curriculum of identity through any makerspace or career-focused disciplinary unit.
Narrative as a Strategy for Hands-On Learning in Early Childhood Education
Lígia De Souza Ribeiro, Maria Carolina Mariano, Raíssa Barbosa, Marina Mariano and Elisa Hamdan
PDF | We present the project “To Capture to not capture” developed by children from 2 to 7 years old, students of a private kindergarten school, located in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Here, we present the contribution of narratives to methodologies for hands-on learning.
Smashing Barriers to Access STEAM
Leanne Gibson
PDF | Young people in South Auckland who are predominantly Maaori or Pacifica from low-income families face tremendous barriers in accessing STEAM-based learning. The Maker Space at Manurewa High School, a public high school serving Years 9-13, has had a significant impact in addressing this access issue for learners. The most important lesson from our first year is that the Maker Space model has much to offer as we progress a transformation of our school to culturally responsive, student choice-based learning.
Teacher Training and Self-Sustaining Network Training as a Strategy for Teaching and More Hands-On Learning
Verônica Gomes Santos, Silvia De Araujo Donnini and Regina Maura Mazzari Viegas
PDF | Educational transformation is becoming more urgent every day. The investment in a more active, dynamic and close-to-the-student education, enabling learning, integral, effective and meaningful, aligns with social and educational needs. Thereby, based on partnerships and successful experiences of technology teachers, with proposals more hands-on learning, the São Bernardo do Campo Department of Education (SP), a municipal public network that serves about 90 thousand students, saw teacher training as a way to make the process of building knowledge author, critical and engaging.
Teaching First-Degree Equations: Opportunities for Developing Computational Thinking Concepts
Luciana Barbosa and Marcus Maltempi
PDF | This work aims to present a hands-on activity for the first-degree equations. The activity was applied to a reinforcement class of the K-8, in a public school in Birigui, São Paulo, Brazil. The activity used the Balance of Equations game, built on the Scratch programming environment with the objective of teaching the initial ideas of first-degree equations to a class with a learning gap in this subject. Seven concepts related to computational thinking with strong potential to be worked during the activity were identified and analyzed how they could be explored through hands-on activity for the teaching of equations. The analysis showed that hands-on activity proposed has great potential to explore the seven skills identified here, thus contributing to the Computational Thinking articulated to the teaching of mathematics to create a productive and creative environment for teaching and learning.
Think Out of the Class, the Makerspace Is Open
Karina Pintos and Elisa Cristi
PDF | Plan Ceibal carries out part of large-scale public policies regarding innovation, technology and education. One of our greatest challenges is to frame new strategies in the national ecosystem that allow us to rethink education practises, where new tools, new materials, new technologies and new skills are permanent invitations to the game proposed by the makers, inveterate enthusiasts who play with technology to learn from it. This paper shows our experience in Uruguay of implementing 20 makerspaces (or ceilabs as we call them) in different schools and contexts and the impact of this new educational space in daily activities by introducing maker culture aspects in everyday teaching practises. Thinking about learning by doing has resulted in a good strategy to promote exploration as a vehicle for discovery learning, as well as to allow the development of some of the cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies, thus fostering the social construction of knowledge driven for creativity and the generation of innovative solutions facing the growing social and environmental challenges. In particular, we want to highlight the case of the School 339, where the proposal has flourished with very positive results in terms of meaningful learning for all partakers, either students, teachers, experts or policy makers.