MakerEd Design Sprint

Session 3

Andrew Carle, Laura Blankenship, Jim Tiffin Jr, Sylvia Martinez

Room 1182

For schools to harness the potential of MakerCulture and digital fabrication, those principles and experiences can't stay cooped up in isolated labs or electives.

Like great PBL, MakerEd requires preparation that's at odds with traditional classroom instruction and planning. “Celebrate excellent mistakes” make a great bumper sticker, but shaping your classroom around divergent, and sometimes dubious, student-led investigations can be terrifying. Our session confronts that reality, and reminds every teacher that they don’t have to solve all those problems on their own, all at once.

That's what Educon is for.

Taking advantage of this unique environment of bold and creative educators, a group of MakerEd veterans will develop open inquiry based prompts to match specific subjects, grades and materials. This isn't a "which 3D printer is best" session, but a collaborative planning session to build generative, productive scaffolding for investigation in a specific classroom, using the materials, tools and resources already available.

Think of it as a workshop or bootcamp or Iron Chef for architects of student inquiry. Each prompt will turn into a robust MakerEd "lesson plan" that focuses on the brass tacks of managing a sprawling inquiry driven classroom.

Conversational Practice

Our conversation starts with a post-it wall of potential projects. We’re equally ready to tackle the fundamental shifts of MakerEd homerooms and the challenging edge cases of content teachers looking to enhance student choice within the confines of standards and assessment.

We’ll form teams of 3-5 educators, with one of the conversation leads in each one. This includes Laura Blankenship, Andrew Carle, Sylvia Martinez, Lindsey Own and as many others from #makered and #dtk12 as will fit in the room.

Our planning format focuses on these five essential components:

Prompt: What's the challenge in its most elegant post-it note form? Participants: Who is doing this thing and when? Is it students in your class or a faculty meeting? Materials: What are the baseline materials that participants NEED to get started? How can you reach out to organizations for access to “dream” tools and materials? Support: Where can you find allies for this work within your school? How can your PLN activley support you and your students during the project? Audience: What happens when things are done? Who, besides you and the student, will offer meaningful feedback on the work?

All lessons created live and collaboratively will be immediately posted to k12makers.org, inviting open reuse, extension and remixing. More importantly, each lesson will have a unique conversation tag, so that teachers can find peers and cohorts interested in exploring particular projects.