I normally tend to stay away from “stuff” lists when it comes to talking about makerspaces. I believe that the stuff that goes into a makerspace should be based around the needs of the students and the school, not on a checklist of items to get. But this list is different. The holiday season is … Read more
Why I love Copernicus Carts In setting up a makerspace in my media center, I’m constantly on the lookout for effective, flexible storage solutions for the myriad of supplies we have. I think I’ve found one of the best ones out there in Copernicus. I started with one Book Browser Cart (similar to this one) … Read more
There’s something about teenage boys and an obsession with weapons and war-games. My students had been building all sorts of crazy machine guns lately, so I decided to try to harness that interest by challenging them to create laser-cannons. We combined several different littleBits with the guns made out of K’nex to create different … Read more
A few days ago, I tweeted out this image of our future Makerspace that I created in Skitch on my iPad. I was inspired by The Nerdy Teacher’s post on rethinking his classroom setup, and I wanted to create a visual that could show what our space will be like when it all comes together. … Read more
As the school year has been drawing to a close, I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on the library Makerspace we’ve been creating at my school. We started out back in January with a couple of bins of K’nex that our science department no longer used. We just left them out on the … Read more
While most educators I talk to seem to be completely enamored with the idea of Makerspaces, I know that there are also naysayers out there who wonder what it’s all about. I’ve had curious people ask me why I have all these “toys” in my library. “Aren’t the students supposed to be here to learn?” … Read more
Learning mess: n., a mess that is created as a result of the learning process; also a mess that encourages further learning My library doesn’t have a dedicated area yet for making. At the moment, our Makerspace is a collection of tables with bins of K’nex, LEGOs and Snap Circuits out on top of them. … Read more
(This is part 3 in a series of Makerspace Wishlist posts. See Part 1: Electonics and Part 2: Technology and Robotics for more. Please note, this post was originally written in 2014 and some products may have changed or been discontinued since then) Engineering Tools When it comes to engineering tools, there’s really two major juggernauts: … Read more
Since the official Teen Tech Week coincides with my district’s spring break, we held our Teen Tech Week activities the week before. Many of them were so popular, that I’ll probably keep them going the week after as well. The K’nex have been an amazing addition to our library. I’ll see students constantly tinkering with … Read more
You may remember that a few weeks ago I wrote about how I started a K’nex club at my school. We’ve only had a few meetings so far, but the kids are loving it, and I feel like they’ve already really started to bond together. So far, I’ve started out each meeting with a brainstorming … Read more