Student Project Spotlight

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.

Work-in-Progress: the process of making ideas a reality

Throughout the summer making program, we used several techniques to help students develop their ideas at different stages of making. The processes of drawing, prototyping, and documentation are just as important as the actual ‘making’ of a project. 1. Journals: Initial ideas, sketches of designs, lists, a working book that keeps everything organized. Every student…

Building Circuits with MaKey MaKey

We spent a week using the MaKey MaKey and Scratch to create interactive instruments and controllers. The MaKey MaKey is a kit that let’s you interact directly with your computer to control the keyboard and mouse. The week was popular with students, and in 5 days they learned the concept of circuits, programming, and made…

Cutting Tools and Young Makers

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…

Summer Making (Part 2) – Woodworking & Installations!

Summer making in the Creativity Lab was wildly successful.  It lasted 5 weeks and taught more lessons than can be contained in one digestible blog post so here are a few bites-sized morsels: The impact of concentrated making over time on students is visible.  The results include increased confidence, creativity, and resourcefulness. Talking about what…