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Makedo is a simple to use, open-ended system of tools for creative cardboard construction. Build imaginative and useful creations from upcycled cardboard.

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STRAWBEES | Prepare for the future with our building & coding system

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Strawbees is helping to define the Future of Learning by providing an open-ended system that creates opportunities for fun and engaging experiences.

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Education Bundle

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Imagine growing up with a mindset that you can make and do anything. Engage students from K-12 to University across a wide range of subjects. Watch Video Bundles and discounts of all shapes and sizes Discounts up to 50% and EDU Bundles for any classroom and learning space

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Blue Blocks

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Imagination Playground Big Blue Blocks are an innovative, loose parts playground equipment system that transforms any space - schools, children's museums, parks and recreation, daycare centers, camps, hospitals, churches - into a play space that encourages learning, social development, movement, and above all fun.

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The Children's School Innovator's Playground & Maker Faire

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The Children's School Innovator's Playground & Maker Faire

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Maker Faire Atlanta, a celebration of the Maker movement, is the greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth!

The Children's School will participate in Maker Faire Atlanta 2016! This year's festivities are Oct. 1, 1o:00 a.m. - 5 p.m., and Oct. 2, 12:00 - 5:00 p.m.

Maker Faire is a family friendly showcase of invention, creativity, and resourcefulness. It's a place where people show what they are making and share what they are learning. Makers range from tech enthusiasts to crafters to homesteaders to scientists to garage tinkerers. They are of all ages and backgrounds. The aim of Maker Faire is to entertain, inform, connect, and grow this community.

The Children's School is the creative brains and brawn behind the Innovator's Playground, a unique maker space within Maker Faire Atlanta, created especially for elementary-aged children and their families. Grounded in the principles of excellence, innovation, and play, making and tinkering is at the heart of learning at The Children's School.

This year, we are excited to share that we have formed a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization called the Southeast Makers Alliance. This collective not only coordinates Maker Faire Atlanta, but through the educational component of , it works to foster innovation, develop entrepreneurship, support creative design, and inspire young people across the region and the state, especially from underrepresented communities, to pursue careers in STEM education and the arts. Also, along with being housed in a new facility, , other features we're excited about this year are additional spaces for making, provided by MakeEdu and The Children's School! With Innovator's Playground (the indoor making environment for young makers), there will be the Maker Courtyard (an outdoor maker space for large activities), and the Maker Playground (an outdoor field designed for larger play activities).

Directions and Parking

Ebster Gym and Recreation Center is located at 105 Electric Ave, Decatur, GA 30030. To get directions from your location, click here.

The closest parking lot to Ebster Gym is the Dekalb County Courthouse Deck on the corner of W Trinity Place and Commerce Drive. Parking is $6 for the entire day. For additional parking options, click here.

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Innovator's Playground & Maker's Faire - The Children's School

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The Children's School will participate in Maker Faire Atlanta 2016! This year's festivities are Oct. 1, 1o:00 a.m. - 5 p.m., and Oct. 2, 12:00 - 5:00 p.m. Maker Faire is a family friendly showcase of invention, creativity, and resourcefulness. It's a place where people show what they are making and share what they are learning.

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What High-Speed Internet Means in the 21st Century

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					MAPPING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE 
				
			
		

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					MAPPING THE DIGITAL DIVIDE 
				
			
		

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COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS ISSUE BRIEF

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Atlanta Science Festival Exploration Expo

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We have served students age 3 - 6th grade in Atlanta since 1970. Click the students to see The Children's School Journey in action!

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Who is The Children's School and What is Innovator's Playground

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Museum Design of Atlanta

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Innovators Playground at Museum of Design Atlanta

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As an education partner of the Museum of Design Atlanta, The Children's School presented the Innovator's Playground, a maker space created especially for elementary-ages children.

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MakerFaire ATL 2015

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Saturday and Sunday at the 2015 Maker Faire

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Maker Faire Atlanta, a celebration of the Maker movement, is the greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth! Maker Faire is a family friendly showcase of invention, creativity, and resourcefulness. It's a place where people show what they are making and share what they are learning.

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Where Achievement Meets Success - July 2015

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Where Achievement Meets Success - July 2015

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Education stories from the Atlanta Regional Commission

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The Things That Matter Cannot Be Bought or Sold

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The Things That Matter Cannot Be Bought or Sold

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Krissy Venosdale

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NYTimes

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There are several passages in the new book "Overloaded and Underprepared" that fill me with sadness for American high school students, the most driven of whom are forever in search of a competitive edge. Some use stimulants like Adderall. Some cheat.

But the part of the book that somehow got to me most was about sleep.

It's a prerequisite for healthy growth. It's a linchpin of sanity. Before adulthood, a baseline amount is fundamental and nonnegotiable, or should be.

But many teenagers today are so hyped up and stressed out that they're getting only a fraction of the rest they need. The book mentions a high school in Silicon Valley that brought in outside sleep experts, created a kind of sleep curriculum and trained students as "sleep ambassadors," all to promote shut-eye.

The school even held a contest that asked students for sleep slogans. The winner: "Life is lousy when you're drowsy."

Sleep ambassadors? Sleep rhymes? Back when I was in high school in the 1980s, in a setting considered intense in its day, the most common sleep problem among my peers was getting too much of it and not waking up in time for class.

Now the concern isn't how to rouse teens but how to lull them. And that says everything about the way childhood has been transformed - at least among an ambitious, privileged subset of Americans - into an insanely programmed, status-obsessed and sometimes spirit-sapping race.

Take one more Advanced Placement class. Add another extracurricular. Apply to all eight Ivies.

Lose a few winks but never a few steps.

"Overloaded and Underprepared," published on Tuesday, was written by Denise Pope, Maureen Brown and Sarah Miles, all affiliated with a Stanford University-based group called Challenge Success, which urges more balanced learning environments. The book looks at homework loads, school-day structures and much more.

And it joins an urgently needed body of literature that pushes back at helicopter parenting, exorbitant private tutoring, exhaustive preparation for standardized tests and the rest of it. This genre goes back at least a decade and includes, notably, Madeline Levine's "The Price of Privilege" and Paul Tough's "How Children Succeed."

But it has expanded with particular velocity of late. "How to Raise an Adult," by Julie Lythcott-Haims, came out last month. "The Gift of Failure," by Jessica Lahey, will be released in two weeks.

There's a unifying theme: Enough is enough.

"At some point, you have to say, 'Whoa! This is too crazy,' " Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford, told me.

Sleep deprivation is just a part of the craziness, but it's a perfect shorthand for childhoods bereft of spontaneity, stripped of real play and haunted by the "pressure of perfection," to quote the headline on a story by Julie Scelfo in The Times this week.

Scelfo wrote about six suicides in a 13-month period at the University of Pennsylvania; about the prevalence of anxiety and depression on college campuses; about many star students' inability to cope with even minor setbacks, which are foreign and impermissible.

Those students almost certainly need more sleep. In a study in the medical journal Pediatrics this year, about 55 percent of American teenagers from the ages of 14 to 17 reported that they were getting less than seven hours a night, though the National Sleep Foundation counsels 8 to 10.

"I've got kids on a regular basis telling me that they're getting five hours," Pope said. That endangers their mental and physical health.

Smartphones and tablets aggravate the problem, keeping kids connected and distracted long after lights out. But in communities where academic expectations run highest, the real culprit is panic: about acing the exam, burnishing the transcript, keeping up with high-achieving peers.

I've talked with many parents in these places. They say that they'd love to pull their children off such a fast track, but won't the other children wind up ahead?

They might - if "ahead" is measured only by a spot in U-Penn's freshman class and if securing that is all that matters.

But what about giving a kid the wiggle room to find genuine passions, the freedom to discover true independence, the space to screw up and bounce back? Shouldn't that matter as much?

"No one is arguing for a generation of mediocre or underachieving kids - but plenty of people have begun arguing for a redefinition of what it means to achieve at all," wrote Jeffrey Kluger in Time magazine last week. He noted, rightly, that "somewhere between the self-esteem building of going for the gold and the self-esteem crushing of the Ivy-or-die ethos, there has to be a place where kids can breathe."

And where they can tumble gently into sleep, which is a gateway, not an impediment, to dreams.

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There are several passages in the new book "Overloaded and Underprepared" that fill me with sadness for American high school students, the most driven of whom are forever in search of a competitive edge. Some use stimulants like Adderall. Some cheat. But the part of the book that somehow got to me most was about sleep.

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A Research Summary on Play and Learning

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NYTimes

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Play is the highest form of human activity. At least that's what Friedrich Nietzsche suggested in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," when he described a three-step development of the human spirit. First, the human psyche has the form of a camel because it takes on the heavy burden of cultural duties - ethical obligations, social rank, and the weight of tradition. Next, the camel transforms into a lion, which represents the rebellion of the psyche - the "holy nay" that frees a rule-governed person from slavish obedience to authority. Finally, this negative insurgent phase evolves into the highest level of humanity, symbolized as the playing child - innocent and creative, the "holy yea." Cue the Richard Strauss music.

Bertrand Russell argued that 'the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.' But he didn't have much company.

As usual with Nietzsche, we can debate the precise meaning of this cryptic simile (e.g., is the child supposed to be the nihilism-defeating Übermensch?), but it's clear at least that Nietzsche considered play vitally important for humanity. Apart from such a rare paean, however, philosophy has had little interest in play, and where it does take interest it is usually dismissive. For many hard-nosed intellectuals, play stands as a symbol of disorder. Plato's reproach in "The Republic" of artists as merely playing in the realm of illusion famously set the trend, as did Aristotle's claim that play ( paidia) is simply rest or downtime for the otherwise industrious soul. He calls it a "relaxation of the soul" and dismisses it from the "proper occupation of leisure."

Leisure, for Aristotle, is serious business. We get our word "scholar" from the Greek word for leisure, skole. It should not be squandered on play, in Aristotle's view, because play is beneficial only as a break or siesta in our otherwise highbrow endeavors.

The Roman poet Juvenal (circa A.D. 100) used the expression "bread and circuses" to describe the decline of Roman civic duty, in favor of mere amusement. The selfish common people, he scolded, are now happy with diversion and distraction. They care not for the wider Roman destiny because play has distracted them from social consciousness.

To be fair, philosophy has not been completely devoid of proponents of play. Bertrand Russell, in his 1932 essay, "In Praise of Idleness," offered a positive view of "idleness" and leisure, lamenting "the modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake." He also argued that "the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work." If we reduced our workday to four hours, he suggested, we would have the leisure time to think and reflect on every topic, especially the social injustices around us and the manipulations of the state.

So, is play a cultural "cheesecake" that emerged from Homo sapiens' big-brained adaptations, like language and imagination? Or is it a common feature of animal life? We now know, from animal ethology and affective neuroscience, that play is widely distributed in the mammal class. Juvenile play in mammals is an important means of social engagement that helps animals become familiar with bodies, learn dominance and submission relations, form alliance friendships and experience something that looks a lot like joy. The neuroscientist and "rat tickler" Jaak Panksepp is famous for detailing how rats play, and amazingly how they even "laugh" (with 50 kilohertz ultrasonic chirps). Play is underwritten by an innate brain system, where rough-and-tumble play is motivated and anticipated by spikes in dopamine, while the play itself seems to release pleasurable opioids and oxytocin.

Animal scientists suggest that play evolved as an adaptation for social bonding. Peter Farb's "Man's Rise to Civilization" puts forth the theory that play probably increased substantially for early humans when childhoods became safer - as fathers and mothers hit upon a new division of labor through pair-bonding. Safer, stable family structures during the Pleistocene created greater leisure for our big brains to fill with learning, creating and playing. Even more recent hunter-gatherer tribes, like the Shoshone of the Great Basin, enjoyed surprising leisure time because their subsistence labor was carved so efficiently. (The subject of animal play is nicely summarized in Gordon Burghardt's 2014 survey (pdf) in the journal Animal Behavior and Cognition.)

All this suggests that play is also a crucial part of the full life of the human animal, and yet philosophers have said very little about it. Usually, if we see an appreciation of play, it's an attempt to show its secret utility value - "See, it's pragmatic after all!" See how playing music makes you smarter at other, more valued forms of thinking, like math, logic or even business strategy? See how play is adaptive for social evolution? All this is true of course, but one also wonders about the uniquely human meaning of play and leisure. Can we consider play and leisure as something with inherent value, independent of their accidental usefulness?

A philosophical thought experiment might help us here. The storied tradition of unrealistic scenarios - like Plato's "ring of Gyges," John Rawls's "original position," and Harold Ramis's movie "Groundhog Day" - often help us isolate our hidden values and commitments. So, consider for a moment what life would be like if we did not need to work. Don't merely imagine retirement, but rather a world after labor itself. Imagine that the "second machine age" (currently underway) brings us a robotic, A.I. utopia, where humans no longer need to work to survive. Buckminster Fuller imagined such a techno-future, saying "the true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

The point of this thought experiment is to isolate Aristotle's question for ourselves. What is the proper occupation of leisure? The very phrase "occupation of leisure" demonstrates the trouble. What is the use of the useless? What would, and what should, we do with our free time? After the world of work, will we have the time, energy and ambition to do philosophy, make art, study history, master languages and make craft beers? Will we play creatively as "holy yea-sayers," or will we just watch more TV?

In consideration of this, I want to suggest that we divide play into two major categories; active and passive. The passive
forms - let's call them amusements - are indeed suspicious, as they seem to anesthetize the agent and reduce creative engagement. From our "bread and circuses" television culture to Aldous Huxley's soma culture in "Brave New World," the passive forms of leisure are cheap pleasures that come at no effort, skill or struggle. On the other hand, active play - everything from sport to music to chess, and even some video games - energizes the agent and costs practice, skill, effort and calories. Even the exploration of conscious inner-space, through artificial or natural means, can be very active. The true cultures of meditation, for example, evidence the rigors of inner-space play.

Philosophy should come out to play. At the very least, we need an epistemology of play (that investigates how play produces knowledge) and an ethics of play (investigating the normative issues of play). We might start with Aristotle, despite his suspicion of it. He saw music, for instance, as a pastime that befitted free and noble people. No apologies or justifications are needed for music, he concluded in his "Politics," because "to seek for utility everywhere is entirely unsuited to people that are great-souled and free." I am suggesting that the same charitable logic of civilization be applied to many other forms of play as well.

The stakes for play are higher than we think. Play is a way of being that resists the instrumental, expedient mode of existence. In play, we do not measure ourselves in terms of tangible productivity (extrinsic value), but instead, our physical and mental lives have intrinsic value of their own. It provides the source from which other extrinsic goods flow and eventually return.

When we see an activity like music as merely a " key to success," we shortchange it and ourselves. Playing a musical instrument is both the pursuit of fulfillment and the very thing itself (the actualizing of potential). Playing, or even listening, in this case, is a kind of unique, embodied contemplation that can feed both the mind and the body.

When we truly engage in such "impractical" leisure activities - with our physical and mental selves - we do so for the pleasure they bring us and others, for the inherent good that arises from that engagement, and nothing else. That's the "holy yea."
Stephen T. Asma is professor of philosophy and fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of seven books, and a blues guitarist. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and on Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

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Research Group in Mind , Science and Culture

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Play is the highest form of human activity. At least that's what Friedrich Nietzsche suggested in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," when he described a three-step development of the human spirit. First, the human psyche has the form of a camel because it takes on the heavy burden of cultural duties - ethical obligations, social rank, and the weight of tradition.

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Projects and Inspirations for FabLabs and Makerspaces

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Edith Ackermann