You’re invited! Any time the door is open (note: link only works properly when you’re on campus), students, faculty, staff, parents, and alums are all welcome to come down to the makerspace to learn and work and celebrate our school community together.

Interested in facilitating a project in the makerspace for a class or a club? Get in touch with Allison, Josh, or Colin to strike up a conversation about planning it together.

We like to plan projects collaboratively because we are continually learning about what kinds of recipes create successful experiences in the makerspace. As a place, the makerspace is in some ways like the library: it’s not just a resource closet but a shared learning resource for the community. As a program, the kind of learning that best happens in the makerspace benefits from a set of pedagogical goals that we hope to support. 

What do those goals look like? We list a few key ingredients here that enrich the many flavors of learning in the makerspace and that infuse our planning practices:

Agency
Query: Do students feel valued for the talents they bear, empowered to take intellectual risks,  and capable of determining, without my intervention, when “good” is “good enough”?
For example… we support pluralism: of cognitive approaches, of modalities, of ways to demonstrate mastery. Projects that are rigidly linear and/or have one expected “correct” outcome dismiss the unique gifts each individual student brings to the makerspace.

Authenticity
Query: Does this project ring true with students’ aspirations, their lived experiences, or the reality of the communities in which they may some day participate?
For example… we like to support an ongoing number of opportunities for students to iterate and improve their work. Some projects continue long after the class deadline passes.

Audience
Query: Do students have opportunities to share their work, to see that what they produce can be worthy of other people’s time and attention, or to examine the objects of their learning from another person’s perspective?
For example… we support sharing work online, offline, on campus, off campus, on a stage, or in the lobby. The magic of the makerspace does not come from the tools in the room; instead the learning theory that guides makerspaces is founded upon the unique power of learning through creating shareable work.

Where do we go from here? Come to the makerspace with a class unit, a goal, or an open-ended interest in collaborating, and together we will cook up a project query, assessment options, and other resources to help your project be successful.