Category: Maker Ed

Supporting Oakland Youth with Hands-On Learning Through Home Maker Kits

The response to the spread of COVID-19 has resulted in many sudden changes to schools and learning environments across the country, and the Bay Area is no different. Local schools’ capacities have been stretched thin by a rapid switch to distance learning. To continue to support our mission in this new learning environment, Maker Ed…
What’s Next? When Learning Isn’t as Usual

Our mission is to transform teaching and learning, so what happens when the educators we serve are asked to facilitate remote learning with no notice? Or when parents are suddenly expected to provide engaging learning experiences while also juggling work, loss of income, anxiety, and uncertainty? The public health crisis unfolding around COVID-19 has caused…
An Update on COVID-19 and Maker Ed’s Programming

Like many of you, we at Maker Ed have been monitoring the recent developments around the spread of COVID-19 in the United States. We are monitoring local public health recommendations (from the California State Department of Public Health, Alameda County Public Health Department, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) about group gatherings and…
Zines as Expressions of Community Change

At Maker Ed, we believe that in order to have an impact across the country it is important to also partner with educators locally. One of our local connections is with Achieve Academy, a TK-6 public charter school in Oakland, CA. At our second workshop, we engaged in a Tinkering to Discover lesson focused on…
Earthquake Engineering and Cardboard Linkages at the CA STEAM Symposium

We had a blast at the recent 2019 CA STEAM Symposium held in Anaheim, CA! We loved meeting so many educators over the course of two days in this year’s Makerspace. We hosted a drop-in Earthquake Engineering activity, as well as a Cardboard Linkages workshop session. Read more…
Making to Learn About the Civil Rights Movement through Sewing and Textiles

Our approach to professional development is intentionally designed to be experiential, where educators actively participate from the perspectives of their learners as a way to reflect on their own practice, facilitation, and design of maker centered learning experiences. To support educators from a variety of environments, we also integrate making experiences that represent a diversity…
Wheel of Documentation: Workshop Takeaways

How can documentation support assessment? How do you know when learners know? What types of learning do we value, but don’t normally assess? In our recent two-day, hands-on workshop, Documenting for Assessment, we explored these questions while developing a variety of tools and strategies to make learning visible and broaden our notion of what is…
Computational Thinking with micro:bit at an East Bay Maker Educator Meetup

As an opportunity to explore programming and computational thinking with a community of educators, we recently prototyped a physical computing with micro:bit activity at our kickoff East Bay Maker Educator Meetup (EBMEM). Read more…
Announcing Our Fourth Cohort of Making Spaces Hubs!

We are very excited to announce our fourth cohort of Making Spaces Hubs! These 10 hubs—including two community makerspaces, three K–12 school systems, three higher education institutions, and three museums—are joining this 30-month professional learning and capacity-building program designed to develop local leadership around maker-centered learning. Read more…
Supporting Interactive Youth Maker Programs in Public and School Libraries: Design Hypotheses and First Implementations

Lee, V.R., Lewis, W., Searle, K.A.,Recker, M., Hansen, J., & Phillips, A.L. (2017, June). Supporting Interactive Youth Maker Programs in Public and School Libraries: Design Hypotheses and First Implementations. In […]