With the start of the new year, Lighthouse is putting together a list of official internship and volunteer sites. As they have done for the past 11 years, this spring at Lighthouse, all of the 11th grade students will complete a volunteer internship at a local business, organization or youth development program in the community.…
Antonio and Amani are working to create an automatic firing marshmallow gun, and in order to get to their final goal, they started out by building a manual marshmallow gun. In this series of blog posts we are shining a light on our bright students as they create making projects in their in-school making class…
Welcome to our blog mentoring series where it is my goal to shine the light on our bright Lighthouse students as they create making projects throughout the 2016-17 school year. One area we will focus on is developing student agency which is one of the core values associated with maker-centered learning. This is one of…
Fun fact: here at the Creativity Lab, Making isn’t just about making things. Making is also about learning to see the world with new eyes, and developing deeper knowledge and understanding of the world around us. One of the ways we incorporate this idea is through using Agency by Design’s thinking routines. Educators can easily integrate these routines into any subject — even those not typically associated with making, like the Humanities. The first routine, called Parts, Purposes, and Complexities, (PPC) is a great one to start with, and is applicable to physical objects as well as abstract ideas and constructs.
Project: Van de Graaf Generator Makers: Gilberto C., Arya B., Martin R. At least from my perspective, this is one of the bigger and more complex of our student projects being worked on this year for Maker Faire. A Van de Graaf generator is a machine that builds up an electric charge inside of a metal…
Maker Faire prep is coming along. While the Creativity Lab staff is hard at work getting t-shirts ordered and schedules planned (and more—trust me, there’s quite a bit of work involved), students are working to get their projects wrapped up. I’m dedicating the next few weeks to previewing some of the projects that students will be showing…
I have spent the last nine months deeply submerged in Making (in School). When given the opportunity to share what I’ve seen, I never feel I can share enough, perhaps because the nature of the idea of “Making in School” itself is so grandiose. There are so many facets to it, so many ways to…
This post is to highlight the projects students completed in our Installation and Community Projects week. Students were told to design and build a project for the school or their community using the skills and techniques they had learned this summer. Here are some of the projects from that week.
I led a group of students in building storage for the makerspace. Together, we built a large rack for storing lumber and a rolling toolbox/whiteboard combo. Obviously this was very helpful for Lighthouse School. The high school makerspace is currently a multi-function room -a common scenario for makerspaces in schools. It is shared by the…
Kids of pretty much any age can use tools. Determining which age groups can use what tools (with what kind of supervision) is the trick. When do you trust someone to use power tools? When do you trust a student to cut without supervision? In this post I will talk about cutting tools used in…