The 2016 Stewart MakerFair Every year since we started our makerspace in January 2014, we’ve held a Maker Fair during the last conference night of the year (See our 2014 MakerFair and our 2015 MakerFair). This year’s was even bigger and more awesome. We had more interactive student projects and I had more student volunteers … Read more
Tinkering Fundamentals: Week 4 Tinkering Fundamentals is a massive open online course (MOOC) put on by San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum every summer. I’m going to be chronicling my six weeks with this course here so you can learn along with me. See Week One, Week Two and Week Three for more Thoughts on Readings & … Read more
Tinkering Fundamentals: Week 3 Tinkering Fundamentals is a massive open online course (MOOC) put on by San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum every summer. I’m going to be chronicling my six weeks with this course here so you can learn along with me. See Week One, and Week Two for more Thoughts on Readings One of the … Read more
Makerspaces in Schools: How to Create STEAM Connections In our makerspace, our students are learning both formally and informally, discovering new things about science, engineering and more. They are gaining such skills as creativity, problem solving, and collaboration, and they’re having fun while doing it. Our makerspace truly is an invaluable STEAM resource for … Read more
The Stewart 2015 MakerFair In April, we held our second annual Stewart MakerFair during our final parent conference night of the year. Last year’s Mini Makerfaire was focused more on introducing our community to what we had started with our Makerspace program. This year, our program was already well-established, so we created a fun event focused … Read more
Last month, I had the honor of giving a Pecha Kucha talk at the Hillsborough Women in Tech event. A Pecha Kucha is an ignite style talk, with twenty slides that automatically advance every twenty seconds. This was my first time giving this style of talk and it’s a lot more work than the forty-five minute conference … Read more
*Build of the Week is a regularly occurring segment on Renovated Learning where I share some of the awesome stuff my students have been making over the past week.* This build isn’t actually from this week, but is instead something my students made last month. I finally got all the videos and photos together this week. … Read more
For the month of October, our after-school STEAM Maker Club has been focusing on the Cardboard Challenge. We started off by watching the short film on Caine’s Arcade together. If you haven’t seen it, watch it right now: My students were inspired by all the amazing games made by Caine, and immediately started working on … Read more
Taking Baby Steps Towards Starting a Makerspace As you know if you’ve been following my blog and Twitter account, I’m a bit obsessed lately with the concept of Makerspaces in libraries. I’ve been brainstorming and grant writing. I’ve been telling everyone I know about my vision for what I want my school’s library Makerspace to … Read more