At the culmination of a month-long 3rd and 4th grade Expedition on Natural Occurrences, the Creativity Lab developed two making projects based on Housing and Civil Engineering. Collaborating with 3/4th grade teachers, the Lab created two design challenges focusing on earthquakes and tsunamis, natural occurrences relevant to the Bay Area and California.
Our ongoing meeting of the Making, Art(s) and Design Inquiry Group took place this week, where we discussed connections across the MAD classes, continued our work linked to career pathways, and discussed how to design a Portfolio Experience for our students.
In the second meeting for the Making, Art(s) and Design Inquiry Group held last week, we continued to build on our reflection, critique and portfolio practices, and introduced examples of Critique Protocols. As mentioned in the last blog post, the purpose of these meetings is to discuss integrating portfolio work and documentation, possibly in a…
Staff members from the Lighthouse Making, Art(s) and Design Inquiry Group met last week, led by our electives coordinator, Brianna Shahvar, to discuss integrating portfolios and documentation into each of our classes. The purpose of this process is to encourage students to document their own thinking, to look more closely at their projects and/or products,…
We recently had our annual King of the Hill competition with our 12th grade Physics students! Each year our Physics students build mousetrap cars as they begin to study forces and motion. The first round of cars don’t work very well; the students don’t really know yet what it takes to make a durable and…
I think we all like making for different reasons. For some of us it might be driving a curriculum, and for others it might be just the thrill of getting messy, or exploring new technologies. Looking back on my year with the Creativity Lab, I think I’ve probably gone through cycles of areas that really excited me. I’m definitely a cardboard…
This project was inspired by the hit video Caine’s Arcade, and concluded our summer making program.
For several weeks, our first graders have been exploring concepts like “balance” and “spinning” by building toys. Their making combined experimentation, observation, engineering design, and design thinking. And it went something like this: Building a Balancing Crayfish Calling it a “crayfish” is sorta killing me, being from Louisiana (down there, it’s a “crawfish”), but I guess out here…
Scribble machines are quick projects that combine arts and crafts with the basics of circuitry. They’re incredibly open-ended, making them a great exercise in creative design and persistence. The idea is to build a robot that draws as it moves, and we typically don’t give students any further instruction after this prompt. This usually creates some frustration, but also…
In a perfect world I’d sit them all in two long rows, facing each other, scissors in hand, able to look up, across, or over for help and we would walk through cutting tightly curved lines. But what world is perfect anyway? Welcome to making with first graders. As a fun introduction for making Making…