EDET 677 Mech App Week 9 Blog

EDET 677 Mechanical Applications

Week 9 Blog

Essential Question: What would you need to coordinate a “Maker Day” for your school?

            According to the White House website during Barack Obama’s presidency, “America has always been a nation of tinkerers, inventors, and entrepreneurs” and that Maker Days, Maker Faires, and the National Week of Making are great ways to celebrate the ability to use technology to create and make new technologies and other devices to better the world. (2014) It is exciting for me as a teacher to provide opportunities for students to tinker and make but its even better when the community is involved in a Maker Day. The possibilities of connections and collaboration between students and adults give me the urgency of putting a Maker Day together sometime in the near future. There are a few ways to hold a Maker Day such as having a culminating project that all will be working on or having multiple stations that attendees can make and tinker at with professionals. In interest of having a controlled environment and being a first-time coordinator, I would like to put together a Maker Day that has a culminating project that all attendees would try to solve.

            Chricton and Carter provide a great guide on how to hold a Maker Day that has groups in solving a presented problem. The guide has a great example that attendees will need to try and solve by creating something. The prompt is that “your team has been selected to develop the prototype of a tool that will help this identified population with their need to get out of their homes and participate in public outings.” (2014) I would come up with some sort of prompt that is connected to the community of Dillingham. Each group would be provided with some guided discussion questions that would help them brainstorm ways to solve the problem. Attendees will be given different information about the problem and have access to various types of professionals who could answer questions they might have. At the end of the day, there will be judges who would rate the solutions and what the groups ended up making to fix the problem.

            Here is a list of what would be needed:

People:

            Group leaders (adults who understand the maker initiative)

            Professionals in various careers connected to problem

            Judges

            Guest speakers

Materials:

            Small Washers

            3” Ardox nail

            Small garbage bag

            Glue gun

            Glue sticks

            Modeling clay

            Jute twine

            Marbles

            Duct tape

            Jumbo straws

            Bamboo skews

            Coloured cocktail straws

            Tooth picks

            Tongue depressors

            Sharpie pen

            Cardboard trifold display

            Graph paper

            12” Ruler

            Utility knife

            Zip ties

            Needle nose pliers

            Cotter pins

            Small springs

            Cardboard sheet

            Cardboard box

            (This is for prototype building) from Chricton and Carter

Makerspace Materials:

            3-D printer

            Arduino

            Shop materials from local college

Resources:

Chricton, Dr. S., Carter, D. (2014). Maker Day Toolkit. Innovative Learning Centre Advisory Board: The University of British Columbia. Retrieved from http://www.itabc.ca/sites/default/files/docs/discover/Final%20MakerDayToolKit.pdf

Martinez, S. L., & Stager, G (2013). Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. Torrence, CA: Construction Modern Knowledge Press.

White House (2014). Nation of Makers. The White House: Barack Obama. Retrieved from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/nation-of-makers