# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What We Do

Youth Programs

We offer beginning, intermediate, and advanced programs in core skills that meet and enhance national and local STEM teaching standards, and that have been shown to lead youth to college and career readiness, encourage self-efficacy, and build lifelong learning strategies
Learn More

Educator Programs

Coaching educators on how they can bring technology and making into their learning environment
Learn More

Projects

We're more than just a Tech Center, learn more about what Digital Harbor Foundation has to offer
Learn More

Youth Programs

We offer beginning, intermediate, and advanced programs in core skills that meet and enhance national and local STEM teaching standards, and that have been shown to lead youth to college and career readiness, encourage self-efficacy, and build lifelong learning strategies

Educator Programs

Coaching educators on how they can bring technology and making into their learning environment

Projects

We're more than just a Tech Center, learn more about what Digital Harbor Foundation has to offer

Make a difference by making it all possible
Donate Today

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sorry, but it seems like your browser doesnt support HTML5 video. Mission The Digital Harbor Foundation is dedicated to fostering learning, creativity, productivity, and community through education. In 2013 we transformed a closed-down rec center in Baltimore City into a vibrant Tech Center for youth.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Maker Movement is a creative revolution that engages people of all ages in active learning. In the classroom, students collaborate to develop solutions to real-world problems. This is a fun, challenging and empowering experience, which fosters an ongoing interest in STEM education and careers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
To describe them simply, makerspaces are community centers with tools. Makerspaces combine manufacturing equipment, community, and education for the purposes of enabling community members to design, prototype and create manufactured works that wouldn't be possible to create with the resources available to individuals working alone.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ten years from now, primary and secondary education may look more like a scene from Tim Allen's workshop in The Santa Clause than Ben Stein's economics class in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. In some schools, like San Diego's High Tech High, it already does.
Frequently Asked Questions | Understanding the Rankings | Top 10 High Schools | America's Top High Schools | Beating the Odds - Top Schools for Low Income Students | Mapping America's Top High Schools | Newsweek's Top High Schools Special Section
With compact disc chandeliers, a piano whose glass exterior reveals how it works, birds and whales and geometric shapes soaring overhead, a ring of bicycle wheels the size of a clock tower spinning constantly through an intricate pulley system, and dozens of other mechanisms, paintings, sculptures and projects ornamenting every hall and classroom, High Tech High looks something like a cross between a science center and a museum of modern art, where the only thing more jaw-dropping than what's on display is the fact that all of it is created by kids in grades K-12.

High Tech High was founded 14 years ago by a coalition of San Diego business leaders and educators. It has since grown into its own district of charter schools-three elementary, four middle and five high schools, as well as a graduate school of education-where the learning happens mostly through "kids making, doing, building, shaping and inventing stuff," explains CEO and founding Principal Larry Rosenstock. Students spend most of the school day working together on projects that integrate and apply all of the subjects that are traditionally separated in academic settings. "Kindergarten has it right," Rosenstock says, referring to how kindergarteners "experience [education] as a whole," rather than have someone tell them, "OK, now you're going to math. Then you're going to science," etc.

Consider a recent ninth-grade assignment on the rise and fall of populations. Humanities teacher Mike Strong and physics and engineering teacher Scott Swaaley told their group of 50 freshmen to build a 6-foot-diameter geared wheel out of wood and come up with a theory about why and how civilizations rise and fall based on their readings and research on the Mayans, Romans and Greeks. After presenting and defending each of their theories, they worked in teams of five to figure out a way to physically manifest those abstract concepts in the form of a mechanism to be affixed to and powered by the turning of the class's giant wheel. The result was mesmerizing-a wooden piece of art composed of dozens of gears of varying shapes and sizes, turning in different directions around laser-printed text and illustrations, and a rotating wheel etched with student drawings.

Before it was mounted on the wall of a conference room where visitors now gawk at it, the rise and fall of populations project was displayed at High Tech High's annual exhibition of student learning, a two-night event that is open to the public and attracts thousands each spring. The event features the work of elementary, middle and high schoolers from all the campuses. According to the school's website, "Past exhibitions have included a World War I-era restaurant and cabaret, an art gallery, a museum-like exhibit on the history and physics of baseball, [and] simulations of faraway ecologies."

Adrian, a student and guitarist who chose to build an amp for his project, says that he enjoys exhibition because he loves showing everyone "the process I went through [and] the work I put into it.... I think it's fun when you make something you're really proud of and other people are interested in it and give you compliments." That is precisely the idea behind these exhibitions-to make work fun, public and something in which students take pride. "When kids have that feeling, it's transformative for them," says Rosenstock.

Tony Wagner, current expert in residence at Harvard University's new Innovation Lab, and the founder of Harvard's Change Leadership Group, calls High Tech High his "favorite school" and says of what goes on there, "That's the future." According to Wagner, the idea of school as a place where knowledge is transferred from teacher to student, whose success is measured by the accuracy of his/her regurgitation of it, is antiquated. This instructional model does not foster what Wagner believes is the most essential skill in today's world: the ability to innovate.

In his most recent book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, Wagner profiles some of America's great innovators and observes a pattern in their youths: A childhood of creative play led to their development of deep-seated interests and curiosities, and these passions fueled their intrinsic motivation to set and achieve career and life goals. Another trend Wagner found was that the adults in these innovators' young lives nurtured their imaginations and taught them to persevere and learn from failure. "What we're learning about innovation," says Wagner, "is the importance of failing early and failing often...failing forward, failing fast and cheap. The whole idea of trial and error is something that is antithetical to our formal systems of education.... In fact, we penalize failure.... So there's a complete contradiction between the world of schooling and the world of innovation."

THE MAKER MOVEMENT is a global community of inventors, designers, engineers, artists, programmers, hackers, tinkerers, craftsmen and DIY'ers-the kind of people who share a quality that Rosenstock says "leads to learning [and]...to innovation," a perennial curiosity "about how they could do it better the next time." The design cycle is all about reiteration, trying something again and again until it works, and then, once it works, making it better. As manufacturing tools continue to become better, cheaper and more accessible, the Maker Movement is gaining momentum at an unprecedented rate. Over the past few years, so-called "makerspaces" have cropped up in cities and small towns worldwide-often in affiliation with libraries, museums and other community centers, as well as in public and independent schools-giving more people of all ages access to mentorship, programs and tools like 3-D printers and scanners, laser cutters, microcontrollers and design software.

At schools with makerspaces, students are already starting to follow the pattern that Wagner observes among young innovators. Henry Simonoff, a ninth-grader at St. Ann's School in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of New York City, is one such example. The summer after sixth grade, Simonoff went to a St. Ann's computer camp, where his teacher, Lizbeth Arum, taught him how to model and make electronics cases using the 3-D design Web app Tinkercad. He discovered that he loved designing, so the following school year he took a 3-D printing elective and began experimenting with his own ideas. However, 3-D printing is a slow process, and the MakerBots in the classroom couldn't keep up with Simonoff and his classmates' creative demand.

"I finally decided I could take on much bigger and more ambitious projects if I got one for myself," he says. So he sold his laptop on eBay, added to those proceeds all of the birthday money and allowance he had saved over the years, and took out a loan from the Bank of Dad to buy the cheapest 3-D printer he could find online. By the end of seventh grade, he had paid his father back entirely-all from the sales of his customized iPhone cases and little cone toys that he'd designed to flip around like benign butterfly knives. Once his debt was paid, he could finally begin the more ambitious project he'd had in mind: "the zero point energy field manipulator," or gravity gun, from the video game Half-Life 2. He designed and built a full-size model of it-3 feet long and 2 feet high-"which was pretty difficult," he explains, "because the actual platform of the machine is 10 inches by 10 inches," so he had to get creative. "It pretty much broke down my printer," he says, "but I fixed it." Simonoff's current project-"the sky hook" from the game BioShock Infinite-is an "even more ambitious" endeavor than the gravity gun, "because it has a lot of moving parts, gears, etc." He says it keeps falling apart, but he's not discouraged. "This is really...my passion," he says.

It's not just private school kids who are using this technology. Public schools are also beginning to experiment. Albemarle County Public Schools, for example, a 27-school district serving nearly 13,000 students in the area surrounding Charlottesville, Virginia, is developing classes like the one Simonoff took at St. Ann's and assignments like the giant wheel project at High Tech High. The superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools, Pam Moran, says many of her students are beginning to "see themselves as designers, makers." She says they're now "constantly looking at the world in terms of problems that they can solve." Moran tells an anecdote about one of her high schoolers, who noticed that a screw was missing from the couch in the library and rushed to the librarian to tell her that he could fix it. The student removed another screw to get the dimensions of the one that was missing and came back later that week with an exact copy he'd designed and 3-D printed, which he then used to fix the couch.

Moran says her district's goal is to create experiences for its students that "make learning so powerful and memorable" that they'll seek out those types of experiences post-graduation. Her teaching staff at Sutherland Middle School recently came up with an eighth-grade assignment at a time when, in science, the students were learning about electricity; in history, they were studying 19th century America; and in computer science and engineering, they were 3-D modeling. The teachers of all three subjects came together with the idea of having the kids build Vail telegraphs using 3-D-designed-and-printed parts. After completing the project, an eighth grader named Jennifer said, "We...really understand electricity much better than we would if, say, we just made an electromagnet and started picking up paper clips. It's just easier to understand something if it's right in front of you and you can do different things to it-and see the reactions."

She and another student, Nate, gave a technical explanation of how the telegraph functions when the students presented their project at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C. They also discussed the historical context-"like during the Civil War," Jennifer explained, "they needed relays, so if the electricity were to burn out, the relay would keep the fresh electricity going." After the presentation, the kids set up one telegraph at their middle school and another at the elementary school to communicate between the two with the help of a smartphone app that translates Morse code. In addition to being a fun activity, this put the students in the shoes of the people they were studying in history. "I learn better when I'm experiencing it," says Jennifer.

While this kind of education does result in the gain of measurable, practical skills, "it's really about the problem-solving skills as opposed to the specific [technical] skills," says David Wells, manager of creative making and learning at the New York Hall of Science. It's about teaching kids how to break down their big ideas into smaller components in order to figure out a plausible first step. It's about helping students become familiar not just with makerspace tools but, more important, with the process of finding, accessing and using information to teach themselves how to do whatever it is they want to do, and make whatever they want to make.

As Wells says, "We're developing the 'I can' mentality."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lectures are so old school; the Maker Movement is reinventing education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Technology Integration / Makerspace Magic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Used the allocated technology to design and develop a plan for the creation of a classroom technology focused Makerspace, in which their students addressed real-world scenarios.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Maker Education Initiative - Every Child a Maker

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Home | Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Magazine that celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Stewart Middle Magnet School Library Makerspace Journey

I first started my makerspace journey at Stewart Middle Magnet School in January 2014 with a few bins of K'nex spread out on some library tables. It then grew and expanded into a thriving program and a vital part of the library and school. Take a look back at our journey and see what we learned along the way.

The Makerspace changed, grew and evolved since it was first conceived and started in January 2014. Follow along with the first two years of the story here. Hopefully, it will inspire you to start your own Maker journey 🙂

(Note: I left Stewart in May 2017, but the makerspace there continues to grow. Check out their Twitter feed to see how they're doing)

Quick Background on Stewart

Our school was originally Blake High School, a segregated high school that opened in the 1950s. The school has gone through many transformations since then. We have been a STEM magnet school since 2000 and have students attending from all over Hillsborough County, which is the 8th largest school district in the United States. Our school is 70% free or reduced lunch, and our student body is about 65% boys, 35% girls, with our racial breakdown at approximately 35% African American, 30% Hispanic, 30% white.

Our school has a focus on engineering, robotics, aerospace and video game design. We are a NASA Explorer School and visit Kennedy Space Center on field trips several times a year.

Spring 2015

Our Makerspace celebrated its first birthday 🙂 It was amazing to take a look back and see how much had happened in those first 365 days. It was around this time that I started doing more to share what we were doing at our school and offer advice to others on starting makerspaces. I had already presented once at FAME; in January I got to share at FETC and the FETC Executive Summit about how we started our space. It was exciting to watch other educators discovering the Maker Movement for the first time.

I began to spend more time bringing our makerspace into my collaborations with teachers. We started a project to learn about aquaponics and build an aquaponics system in our library. We also made models of coral reefs out of LEGOs and K'nex.

It was also around this time that I received the criticism that our makerspace was not a "real makerspace" because we didn't have power tools, which led me to reflect on how we define makerspaces.

We held our 2nd Annual Maker Fair, which was even more awesome than the first one. I also took several students and parents to Gulf Coast Maker Con, a local maker event, continuing to add outreach and sharing into our program.

Summer 2015

I didn't spend as much time in our makerspace this summer because I was on the road sharing about what we were doing. In July I went to ISTE in Philadelphia where I shared about our makerspace in a poster session and in two panels. I also spent some time taking the Tinkering MOOC with the Exploratorium, where I reflected on how we could add more tinkering experiences into our space.

Fall 2015

This fall saw the launch of our full-on afterschool STEAM club program. In 2014-2015, I had run a small club in conjunction with our aftercare program. In 2015-2016, we began piloting an afterschool STEAM program sponsored by our STEM Booster Club. It consists of five separate clubs, including gaming, art, space, robotics and my Stewart Makers Club. We charged a fee of $25 a semester to help pay for supplies and teachers were paid with extended learning funds.

We also continued the during school clubs we had before and starting adding to that program with DonorsChoose projects for art supplies, Dash and Dot, Spheros and more.

All of our students now only know of a library that has a makerspace in it; it's become the norm for them. We have groups of students tinkering in our space throughout the day; teachers have started using it as an incentive for students. I've also started bringing our makerspace into even more collaborations with teachers.

Fall 2015 lead to lots of opportunities to share about our space and inspire others. I was honored to have our library featured in School Library Journal when I won the Build Something Bold Award. I shared about how we started our space at AASL to a packed room. I held my first makerspace workshop and playground at FAME.

The library looks very different now than it did before 2014. There's always a buzz of activity and joy in the space. I left Stewart in 2017, but the makerspace goes on 🙂

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Stewart Makerspace Journey | Renovated Learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I first started my makerspace journey at Stewart Middle Magnet School in January 2014 with a few bins of K'nex spread out on some library tables. It then grew and expanded into a thriving program and a vital part of the library and school.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's not a kit, it's a Catalyst.

SO... WHAT THE HECK IS THAT?

A Catalyst is a box filled with parts, like a kit. But it comes with challenges, not instructions-all the pieces and components are thoughtfully selected and designed to enable unlimited projects and discoveries related to principles in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

But it's also a box full of possibilities, a box that sparks wonder, curiosity, and creative innovation. It's full of things that buzz and fly and whoosh, that can be made and unmade and remade in infinite ways. Things that make kids ask "why?" and "what if?" Things that light up both faces and minds-things that spark something.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
SO... WHAT THE HECK IS THAT? A Catalyst is a box filled with parts, like a kit. But it comes with challenges, not instructions-all the pieces and components are thoughtfully selected and designed to enable unlimited projects and discoveries related to principles in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Get the kit that brings learning, problem solving, and the joy of invention to any kid anywhere. | Check out 'Bring Tinkering into Your Home & School' on Indiegogo.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Copyright © 2019 - TinkerLab ® - All Rights Reserved

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Even while working as a software engineer at Microsoft, Dan Shapiro felt the need to do something with his hands. He had gone to school intending to be a physicist but switched to engineering, he says, because he found that he liked fixing machines better than using them. Yet after going into software, a cerebral profession if ever there was one, his passion for making things-woodworking, building drones-was relegated to the status of a hobby, squarely on the periphery of his life.

That is until the day he found himself installing an $11,000 machine, known as a CNC laser cutter/engraver, in his garage.

He had by this time struck out on his own as an entrepreneur and sold a startup, Sparkbuy, a comparison-shopping site for consumer electronics, to Google a mere six months after its launch. He had also created the best - selling board game in Kickstarter history. It was in his quest to make a special edition of his game, Robot Turtles, that he began investigating advanced manufacturing methods.

He was disappointed by what 3D printing could provide: single-color, "blobby" plastic pieces that took a long time to produce. Then he found the laser cutter. Impressed by its potential, he had it shipped to his Seattle home all the way from China. But it was far from user-friendly.

"It took me weeks to figure out how to use it consistently and reliably," he says. But eventually he got to the point where, at least some of the time, he could "put a piece of material in, push a button, and something beautiful would come out."
Related: As Bots Rise Up, Some Level the Playing Field
The idea that resulted-that of "a magic toy box that could print toys"-gave rise to Shapiro's company, Glowforge, one of the most interesting pick-and-shovel businesses in what is popularly known as the maker movement. That movement, long identified with 3D printers, is entering a new phase, and new companies are rising up to provide craftspeople and innovators with compact versions of industrial tools. In the process, these companies hope to empower small businesses, accelerate the pace of innovation and, ultimately, change the dynamics of global commerce.

Shapiro couches his aims in democratic terms. What he wanted, he says, was "to see if we could take this industrial technology that had been locked up in assembly lines and put it on the desktop in a way that was accessible to just about anybody."

Tools of the trade

The Glowforge Photograph by Glowforge

The multibillion-dollar crafts industry, with its hobbyist magazines, specialty stores and celebrities, is hardly new. A 2012 report on the state of the industry by the Craft & Hobby Association, a New Jersey-based trade group, estimated that 62.5 million Americans had taken part in one or more crafting activities in the past year.

There is more than a little overlap between crafting and making. Martha Stewart, the doyenne of crafts, sponsors the annual American Made award to recognize homegrown entrepreneurs. The award is tied to a yearly two-day summit and an online shop that sells handcrafted goods.

"The maker movement is an old thing," says Danielle Applestone, founder and chief executive of San Francisco-based Other Machine, which sells desktop CNC mills. "People used to make their own clothes and make their own food and fix their own cars. This new thing that we call the maker movement is like, 'Oh yeah, remember when we didn't throw everything away? Remember when we didn't buy everything generic?'"

Calling yourself a "maker," says Applestone, who has a bachelor's in chemical engineering from MIT and a doctorate in materials science, is "a way of not feeling weird about making your own stuff."

What does distinguish the maker movement from old-style crafting, however, besides its iconoclastic air, is the willingness to embrace cutting-edge manufacturing methods alongside, or even in place of, traditional craftsmanship.

The first of these methods was 3D printing, which creates objects by building up material, usually malleable plastic, layer by layer. By contrast, both the Othermill, Applestone's machine, and Glowforge's namesake product manufacture through subtraction.

The Glowforge, which for the sake of marketing the company calls a "3D laser printer," uses a laser the width of a human hair to slice through rigid material and carve designs. The Othermill and its big brother, the Othermill Pro, are designed to etch circuit boards and create high-precision metal parts. They can also carve hard plastic and Teflon. Both are compact enough to sit on a desk or a kitchen table.

Both machines are computer-controlled, and the Glowforge, though it's compatible with the most common design software, can even make objects based on simple freehand drawings-no digital skills required.

The idea is that the versatility of these machines will free creatives and engineers to experiment and do rapid prototyping with a wide variety of materials. The Glowforge can work with wood, leather, stone, paper, cardboard, acrylic and more. The ability to work with non-ferrous metals is one of the Othermill's strengths.

"To date, in order to be crafty, in order to be a maker or a tinkerer, you have to go deep on some form of tool," Shapiro says. "You spend years of your life learning to draw, or you spend years of your life learning to use a table saw, or you learn years of your life learning to cut paper. Our goal with Glowforge-and I think the evolution of maker culture-is instead of having the new maker tools be another singular tool, to have them be an amplifier that . . . allows people to make more beautiful things, more durable things more quickly than they ever could before."

The Othermill Pro in action Photograph by Other Machine Co.

It's a vision sure to resonate not only with artists and hobbyists but with industrial designers and engineers. "If you make engineers dependent upon an external machine shop to make their parts, you have to wait forever to get a part and you won't be able to innovate as fast," Applestone says. With your own CNC milling machine, by contrast, "you can do so many iterations in a single day."

Ultimately, says Shapiro, it's not about the tool: "It's about the creative superpowers that we can give people."

Shipping out

Last fall, Glowforge completed the biggest 30-day crowdfunding campaign in history, receiving $27.9 million in preorders. By then, the company had already raised $9 million from angel investors-including Bre Pettis, the founder of 3D-printing company MakerBot-and the venture-capital firm Foundry Group. Shapiro says he used the money to build prototypes so that he could be sure he had "taken the technical risk out" before taking customers' money.

But getting the beta units in backers' hands has been a challenge. Notwithstanding the prototype phase, the Glowforge team-now up to 28 people-has found improvements to be made to the early models. Some beta users have received their machines by now, but others are still waiting. "The beta has caused a lot of hate mail from people who haven't gotten one yet," Shapiro admits.

Other Machine, which grew out of a DARPA-funded program, raised about $311,000 on Kickstarter in June 2013 before taking $6 million in angel investment and venture capital. More recently, the company took out a bank loan. "This is not easy, by the way," says Applestone, laughing the throaty, nerdy, joyous laugh with which she punctuated our conversation.

In September 2014, Other Machine shipped the last of the 205 units that were earmarked for Kickstarter backers, only to discover during the transition to normal sales that the $2,199 Othermill was too expensive for most makers, especially hobbyists. "The Etsy crowd" wasn't yet ready for milling, Applestone says.
Related: The Open-Office Concept Is Dead
Having started the company with three others and grown it to a staff of 20, Applestone says it has since downsized to 13 people. She regrets not doing more to target educational institutions, which she says have snapped up about half of all the Othermills sold, though she won't reveal the total.

Targeting the education market has worked well for littleBits, another Foundry portfolio company that sees itself as part of the maker movement. It bills itself as a "platform of easy-to-use electronic building blocks that empower you to invent anything, from your own remote controlled car to a smart home device." The bits are magnetized, so no soldering or wiring-or, for that matter, programming-is needed to build functioning machines.
Ayah Bdeir, founder of littleBits Photograph by Brian W. Ferry

In May, the company launched the School Chapters program, designed to build a global network of educators who use littleBits in their curriculum. About 45 schools have signed up as official chapters so far, though already more than 3,000 schools worldwide use littleBits as a teaching tool. The platform has been used not only to increase kids' technological literacy and introduce them to engineering concepts but to teach Greek mythology and even poetry, says Ayah Bdeir, Littlebits' founder and CEO. She is acutely aware that her products are training the next generation of makers-customers one day, perhaps, of Other Machine and Glowforge.

The future of the movement, Bdeir says, depends on "speak[ing] outside the choir, so you're not just talking to people who have already been convinced of the virtues of making and experimenting."

Everyone an artisan

Just as the iPhone App Store launched a thousand startups, so the Glowforge could launch a thousand Etsy businesses. Shapiro compares the Glowforge's money-making potential to that of the sewing machine, historically a source of income for many households. "The first generation of the maker movement was a lot of 'Gee whiz, look what you can do,'" he says. "Now we're talking about machines that can earn their keep."

The proposition involves something of a bait-and-switch. Were the Glowforge to become as ubiquitous as ordinary home printers, prices for simple housewares and many other basic goods would most likely drop to zero, since just about anyone could make their own at any time. Why pay a seller's markup?

Confronted with this logic, Shapiro admits that cheap goods may become fungible commodities, and will be priced accordingly, yet he insists that true artistry will shine forth all the more. "Over time," he says, "the things that will have value and the entrepreneurs who will last are the people who transform that basic commodity, who use the Glowforge as a means to create something utterly unique."
Related: This Whole 'Eating Bugs' Thing Actually Has Legs
But it remains to be seen whether desktop manufacturing will truly go mainstream. It would take massive scale to change the global manufacturing paradigm, in which currently the cheapest way to produce many basic goods is to make them in distant factories and transport them across the world on container ships. Applestone, for her part, seems to have drawn back from the consumer market with the release last month of the Othermill Pro, a faster, pricier model that allows users to make tinier, more precise cuts.

Even so, she remains steadfast in the belief that the maker movement must become a mass movement. She envisions "CNC everything"-computer-controlled power tools for consumers that will smash the barrier to entry for creating physical products.

"The role of machines like ours, and Glowforge," Applestone says, "is that they need to be everywhere. You need the people that have the ideas to have the tools. Otherwise it's too slow."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Maker Movement Is Entering a New Phase

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Even while working as a software engineer at Microsoft, Dan Shapiro felt the need to do something with his hands. He had gone to school intending to be a physicist but switched to engineering, he says, because he found that he liked fixing machines better than using them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC is best known as 'America's attic' -- a collection of 19 museums and galleries. But it's also fast becoming a hotbed of maker innovation for the city's teenagers. Introducing ARTLAB+.

Say 'Smithsonian' and you'll likely invoke references to such treasure troves as the National Museum of Natural History and the National Air and Space Museum. But nestled in the Hirshhorn Museum's sunken sculpture garden is a very different space -- ARTLAB+: a tech-focused drop in center that's increasingly popular with Washington DC teenagers.

ARTLAB+ was set up five years ago as part of a push to create community maker spaces. Today it's a dedicated place for young people to socialize, learn about digital media, and participate in workshops.

Four times a week some 40 kids from across the city congregate for a couple of hours at this innovative youth program. But unlike other after-school programs, at ARTLAB+ teens have complete access to -- well -- pretty much every piece of cutting edge maker technology you could think of: including Macs, iPads, 3D scanners, 3D printers, game consoles, and Makey Makeys (!).

But there's something else that ARTLAB+ offers that the kids wouldn't normally get: mentorship. All of the lab's mentors are industry pros -- a collection of game designers, 3D designers, photographers, and videographers.

"We don't just have the equipment, we can actually show kids the best ways of using it. It's much easier than learning from YouTube!" says Cody Coltharp, ARTLAB+'s 3D mentor. "We champion the HOMAGO process here: informal learning happens through Hanging Out and Messing Around, and eventually leads to Geeking Out! That said we've started to run some structured sessions once a week."

One of the ARTLAB+'s current initiatives is a series of game design workshops in which teens scan themselves in 3D, rig and animate the model, and put their character into a game engine.

With this in mind, it's odd to think that most kids start out at ARTLAB+ with very little technology experience. The majority quickly cut their teeth building with papercraft projects, before moving onto to more sophisticated software processes; like digital modeling and game design.

Makey Makey is another popular starting block.

"We introduce it when we teach the basics of circuitry and electricity," says Cody. "But we also see lots of custom game controllers being built using Makey Makeys. We had one teen build one for walking around in the game Terraria and I've seen kids make new instruments for Garageband and use them in retro gaming. It all depends on what they're interested in or what their aims are."

As part of its mission to champion innovation and collaboration, one of ARTLAB+'s core aims is to be 'radically inclusive' -- as accessible as possible to every teen, no matter what their background. While most of the regulars come from traditionally underprivileged neighborhoods, others turn up with their own private drivers.

"It's pretty rad that this is a place of equality, says Cody. "Everybody plays games together and works on projects together. And we're getting more and more popular. To stay accessible we've started doing some off-site workshops; and to be honest, most schools don't have the funding to provide the kind of technology we have access to."

While the team has close partnerships with several schools and libraries in the city, most teens find out about ARTLAB+ through word of mouth. ARTLAB+ also benefits from being part of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the modern and contemporary art museum of the Smithsonian Institution. Cody and the team run game design workshops at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Indie Arcade events, and have been involved in a variety of events at other museums.

Moving forward, the mentors are keen to grow the city's program, but ultimately the ambition is to scale the program itself.

"We'd always like more room, more mentors, and more cool toys," says Cody. "But I'd also love to see what we do packaged up and adopted across the country, to continue its success."

In terms of recent ARTLAB+ successes, Cody gives the example of a teen who was invited to the first ever White House Maker Faire for her original papercraft dinosaur head, and also recounts another's effort to make a functioning Ironman mask.

"One day he walked in saying 'I want to make a dope mask like that'. So he stated with a sketch, made a foam prototype, and eventually developed the metal version.

"But he didn't stop there: he kept taking what he knew and leveling up, teaching himself about vacuum sealing, circuitry, epoxies.

"The fact he didn't stop, that he continues to evolve his skillset, that's what I would consider a success: the ability to inspire lifelong learning."

For more info on ARTLAB+ please visit their website. More photos are available on their flickr and Facebook pages.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC is best known as 'America's attic' -- a collection of 19 museums and galleries. But it's also fast becoming a hotbed of maker innovation for the city's teenagers. Introducing ARTLAB+. Say 'Smithsonian' and you'll likely invoke references to such treasure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
* This amazing guest post was written by my incredible students Sarah Almeda, Antigone Bellanich, and Patrick Westervelt, and all of the ideas it in have been formulated by them.

They arrive en masse, early in the morning, excited, anxious to start working, and after a brief presentation to give them direction- no, not direction, INSPIRATION- a marathon, rather, a sprint begins: several straight hours of focused collaboration and rapid creativity. fueled by energy drinks and pizza slices, held in one hand while the other hand works ceaselessly. They rest in sleeping bags, if at all. Driven, dedicated, crazed. with one goal: that by the end of the day they will have solved this problem, tackled this challenge, finished this creation, accomplished something they can feel proud of. What I have written here describes what many people would call a hack-a-thon, hackfest, hack day or game jam, events that encourage participants to solve a problem or create a finished project within a time limit- specifically geared towards those with interests in computer science, coding, and game design.

The MakerJam Team seeks to extend that definition.

Organized by three New Milford seniors that love and embrace their school's lively maker culture, MakerJam intends to follow the game jam and hack-a-thon model by creating a fast-paced, collaborative environment that demands rapid creativity, innovation, teamwork, and problem solving- while extending that platform to makers from all fields of creative passion, be it music, art, writing, science, or something entirely different.

Following the secret theme release on June 6th, intended to jumpstart and inspire (but not restrict!) creativity, MakerJam 2016 will run from 8am to 3pm on June 7 for the students at New Milford High School. During that time, students have the challenge to make something, ANYTHING, by the end of the day, inspired by the central theme.

Maker Jam hopes to be an experience that inspires creativity in students of all kinds- from those that have never had the time, environment, or motivation to create, to those makers that have been waiting for a chance to showcase their creativity without having to conform to or fit the traditional art or talent show, to those that regularly create but have never been challenged by limits on time and planning.

For future years, MakerJam plans not only to spread to other locations, but to extend to become and online and therefore global challenges as well.

You can find out more about the team and its mission on the MakerJam website, or by following MakerJam on Facebook or Twitter.

If your school makes along with ours, please tweet your creations to #makerjam2016.

This year's theme reveal:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
MakerJam 2016: The Who, The How, The Why - Worlds of Learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This amazing guest post was written by my incredible students Sarah Almeda, Antigone Bellanich, and Patrick Westervelt, and all of the ideas it in have been formulated by them. They arrive en masse, early in the morning, excited, anxious to start working, and after a brief presentation to give them direction- no, not direction, INSPIRATION- a marathon, rather, a sprint begins: several straight hours of focused collaboration and rapid creativity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
While school is out for the summer, part of Lincoln Elementary's campus, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will be transformed into an outdoor makerspace. When students return in the fall, they will get to see how their own design concepts have turned into an engaging environment for learning by making.

Lincoln Elementary is just one of seven schools across the Pittsburgh region where new makerspaces are emerging through a collaboration with the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, Kickstarter, and a host of community partners. Their approach offers a sustainable model for funding and professional development that other schools and communities might want to borrow to kick start their own maker efforts.

Maker Hubs

The Children's Museum of Pittsburgh was a natural convener for the Kickstarting Making initiative. "We've been doing making at the museum since 2010," says Lisa Brahms, director of learning and research. "Our goal is to get making into schools in ways that are organic, attuned to each school, and sustainable."

Seven of the ten schools that were part of this first crowdfunding effort met their goals, raising more than $107,000 in all. Part of the funding will go toward professional development provided by museum staff. "To integrate making successfully in schools," Brahms says, "we've learned that the most important thing is professional development for educators." It's a mistake, she cautions, for schools to think they can "just raise some money, buy a 3D printer, and have a makerspace."

Before schools jump into the #makered movement, Brahms recommends considering three big questions:

1. What's your purpose? What are your goals for integrating making in your school? Does it really fit with your mission? Each of the new makerspaces across the Pittsburgh region will be unique, reflecting local context and learning goals.

2. Who are your champions? The most successful school makerspaces, Brahms says, "have a champion teacher and a champion administrator who take this on as their passion. They see it as integral for learning."

3. What stuff will you need? Make sure your wish list for "stuff" to equip your makerspace aligns with your learning goals. Some schools strategically focus on digital making while others stick with low-tech materials and tools.

Full STEAM Ahead

At Lincoln Elementary, the new makerspace aligns with a larger STEAM education strategy. Shaun Tomaszewski, coordinator of STEAM education for Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS), says the essence of STEAM "is cross-curricular instructional design. STEAM is not 3D printers or laser cutters. It's powerful teaching and learning that enables students to engage with their communities."

The STEAM model adopted by Pittsburgh Public Schools puts equal emphasis on strong curriculum, innovative teaching, and community collaboration. STEAM learning experiences may look different from one campus to the next, Tomaszewski says, but they all engage students in the engineering and design process to solve interdisciplinary problems. Teachers use the same process of problem solving, analysis, and iteration to design curriculum and improve instruction. "That process is at the core of STEAM," he says.

Planning for the makerspace at Lincoln Elementary is a good example of STEAM education in action. As a whole-school project, students were invited to share their design ideas for the new space. Kids from preK-5 were asked, "If you could learn outside, what would you want that space to look like?"

It seemed like a good question to provoke creativity. But students' ideas quickly stalled. Without much prior experience with outdoor learning spaces, they had trouble imagining their urban blacktop as something different. Teachers realized that kids might need inspiration to dream bigger. They took another run at the question, this time using a charrette process to seed students' thinking with visual examples.

That got the ideas flowing. Eventually, students settled on two concepts that they wanted in their makerspace: a treehouse and a water feature. They also imagined an unused plot of land adjacent to the campus as a space for community gardening, a butterfly habitat, and public art projects.

Turning students' wish lists into a design that would meet building codes and safety regulations posed a new challenge. Tomaszewski turned to a community partner for help. "I asked the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture, 'Could you help us realize this dream that our kids have for their outdoor learning space?'" Architecture professors turned that question into a design challenge for their students. The winner of the Carnegie Mellon makerspace design competition will spend the summer interning with Pittsburgh Public Schools to put the final plan into action.

More Strategies to Borrow

If your school or district is moving in the direction of STEAM education with makerspaces, here are three strategies to borrow from Pittsburgh's example:

1. Invite Students to Be Change Agents

When STEAM education focuses on real-world problem solving, students gain opportunities to be agents of change in their communities. For example, in another interdisciplinary project at Lincoln Elementary this year, students tackled the issue of community violence. "Teachers may wonder, where's the STEAM in that?" Tomaszewski acknowledges.

Among the STEAM activities embedded in the project: demographic surveys designed and conducted in the community by students; data analysis; cross-disciplinary writing in language arts; design and screen printing of tee-shirts in art; and mapping the logistics of a community march and peace rally attended by the mayor, superintendent, and other dignitaries. Students treated their first rally as a prototype and went on to plan a second, even larger event with other schools in the community. "I'd argue that it was a transformative manifestation of STEAM," Tomaszewski says.

2. Support Teachers as Designers

Teachers need time and professional development to tackle the cross-curricular instructional design that STEAM and maker education demand. In many schools, that means making space for teachers to brainstorm across disciplines. "You need to get the English teacher talking with the math teacher," Tomaszewski says. "They need a safe space to think together about: What do our students need to learn? Where are they now? How will we get them where they need to be?"

Just as important as collaborative planning is making time to debrief STEAM projects. "We use PBL modules as problems of practice," Tomaszewski says. "At the end of the project we'll discuss: What went well? Where were the failure points? What can we do better?" Through group critique, reflection, and iterative design, projects get better and teachers gain more confidence in the STEAM arena.

3. Engage Community Partners

Tomaszewski didn't think twice about reaching out to the architecture department at Carnegie Mellon for help with the Lincoln makerspace. Community partners who share a commitment to education are connected across the region in a robust network called Remake Learning. "Collaboration is the zeitgeist here," Tomaszewski says. "That creates a willingness to work together. It's special."

The Children's Museum of Pittsburgh hopes to scale the lessons learned regionally to reach a national audience. Stay tuned for updates, and find more resources about maker education at Makeshop, found on the museum website.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
While school is out for the summer, part of Lincoln Elementary's campus, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will be transformed into an outdoor makerspace. When students return in the fall, they will get to see how their own design concepts have turned into an engaging environment for learning by making.