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…
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…
Projects to make and share, worksheets to use, and probably spelling still to be fixed. None the less, many of our tried and true K-12 making project guides are up for you to use. Keep an eye out for new project additions on the Lighthouse Creativity Lab projects page. Project guide PDF Files can be…
The 2nd graders at Lighthouse are spending the next few weeks learning about habitats of the Bay area and how animals adapt to live in them. Since we have a weekly making time, we decided to do an integrated curriculum making project. The kids (in groups of two) will build one of the four habitats…
During the holiday break the Creativity Lab decided to take advantage of the student-free time by transforming the already awesome makerspace we’ve built, to an even more student-friendly place. The golden rule in organization is this: in the end everything has a place, within the place it functions. To break this down a little, here…
Wednesday, December 18 was not only my birthday, but also the Lighthouse Community Charter School Winter Expo. Parents are required to attend three events each school year and the Winter Expo is one of them. My mind goes to the single parent, exhausted from a 12-hour workday, having then to trek across Bay Area rush…
One of the Creativity Lab’s top priorities is to get our community comfortable with the idea of making things, and perhaps more importantly, to learn to be persistent when things get tough and to learn from mistakes made along the way, whatever the project. Take for example the challenges 2nd graders have faced trying to…