EDSURGE AT MAKER FAIRE! What could school be like? Oh, we learned a lot at Maker Faire! More than 20 exhibitors and two dozen speakers joined us in the DIY Learning: The New School pavilion, over three days (Thursday's Education Day and the weekend.)
From Brainspaces' delightful architect Amy Yurko we learned about how physical space can inspire creativity. We built Scratch games with Torbjorn Skauli. We sliced and diced wood, cardboard and acrylic with the fabulous four from FabLab San Diego and Castilleja School. We made Squishy Circuits with AnnMarie Thomas with Play-Doh, robots with Wizbots, skittering objects with Massimo Banzi's Arduino team, and loud noise makers with RAFT. We marveled at how to transform a cookie jar into a moody submersive robot with Karl Wendt. We wrapped it up into a digital portfolio with Pathbrite, shared our passions with Rocket21 (what can you do "all day long"? Betsy's answer: drink coffee!), talked about how we liked to learn with Summit School, and glimpsed future curriculum with Root-1, CK-12, MotionMath and Educreations. And we imagined what it would be like to build stuff in class, if each school had a Makerspace.
FRIENDS: Helping EdSurge orchestrate this marvelous event was a collection of generous contributors including the Charter School Growth Fund, the Innovate Foundation Project, Make, Marin Community Foundation.
Support for the equipment came from other terrific contributors, including: Brainspaces, Edmodo, Fab Lab Central, Google, Intel Corp., NComputing, Saxton Bradley, and The Chicago Architecture Foundation.
People who put in heavy lifting with a smile included: Marie Bjerede, Steve Hargadon, Lucy Gray, Alex Hernandez, Jessie Arora, Parker Thomas, Stanford students Emily Goligoski, Daniel Greene and Aneeqa Ishaar, and the whole EdSurge team.
Definitely a new fangled barn raising. And if you missed it? Stay tuned. (Or read what folks are saying about Maker Faire! Hat tip to Alex Hernandez.) Yep, we might just have to do this again!
