Maker Ed has rapidly evolved into a big and important component of 21st century learning. Born out of the culturally impactful Maker Movement, maker education involves providing students with opportunities for hands-on construction, investigation, problem solving, collaboration, and more—all with this community-centric approach. In Maker Ed, students often excel with new types of opportunities to showcase their skills or to develop new ones. With so many potential projects to work on in the classroom or in school makerspaces, adding purposeful, hands-on work to the school day is very effective and inspiring. And, more importantly for educators, there's no wrong way for them to go about introducing maker education. It can be as complex as using various advanced 3D printers or as simple as building with popsicle sticks.
Aside from the likelihood of positively impacting students, Maker Ed is also popular because of its real-world connections. Not only can children further develop key technical skills, maker opportunities also help them to bolster some top soft skills. Making typically involves a lot of collaboration and this is especially true as students move into middle or high school. With unique, fluid opportunities, kids can simultaneously work on bolstering communication, teamwork, and other soft skills in the process. Plus, whether they are using classroom 3D printers, CNC machines, or even low-tech tools, they'll grasp a better understanding on using technology for good as well. Some solid product lines across Maker Ed are 3Doodler, MakerBot, LulzBot, Glowforge, and more. With these innovative solutions, students in all grade levels can truly propel their creative acumen.
It can be hard to convince teachers (let alone students) to use some of their summer vacation to improve their academic skills. This is, of course, understandable since they spend the rest of the year doing just that. Making summer learning fun, however, is a fairly reasonable compromise so that both educators and their students aren’t wasting time.
You know us. No project is too big for our team. We’re in the process of discovering just how true this is and how far this kind of attitude can take us. Recently, we teamed up with a midwestern chapter of the Boys & Girls Club to help them secure STEM tools for launching a brand-new makerspace this coming fall.
This Fourth of July, we decided to experiment with Bare Conductive’s Touch Board to help spark an interest in circuitry among our readers. The Touch Board is a limitless interface at the heart of some of Bare Conductive’s most innovative STEAM tools. Using it, students can turn touch into sound with the help of conductive materials.
We’ve been pretty big fans of XYZ 3D printers since they first launched a few years back. The list included (and still does feature) da Vinci printers, the tall and skinny Nobel, and even a MiniMaker for younger students to take a crack at 3D printing. Their latest addition, however, might just be the best yet. Click to learn more
Inventing things is a great way for children to blossom into STEAM superstars. Never running out of things to invent is a whole different experience. The littleBits Pro Library is new and improved, providing creative students with enough parts to design intricate inventions or colossal creations.
Kids today don’t seem to have the same enthusiasm to build a pillow fort or make costumes out of cardboard. Instead, it is all too common to see them playing with a smart device, but, the line of inventive kits from MakeDo aim to spark creativity in kids by facilitating hands-on building and engaging them with something other than technology.
With Squishy Circuits, students in preschool and the early grades can enjoy a new kind of interactive learning experience. No longer is tech integration something to fear when it comes to young kids. As long as it’s done purposefully and with the right tools, it can provide a wealth of valuable learning opportunities in early education.
Designed to provide students in second, fourth, and fifth grade with some innovative learning opportunities, teachers were thrilled to use the bundles of new technologies in their classrooms thanks to donations from our team and some of our premier manufacturer partners, including Ozobot, Sphero, Modular Robotics, Microbric, and E-Blox and the results are in!
In the 21st century, students belong in the driver’s seats of their learning experiences. Makerspaces are such a great option for educators. They provide a safe space for kids to fail, get creative, and use their interests to help them develop 21st century skills. Perhaps the best part of these environments is that there’s no wrong way to learn within
Snap Circuits’ compact, classroom-friendly kits allow educators to introduce key STEM ideas, like electricity, motion, and environmentalism while students play. Talk about a win-win situation. Among plenty of others, you’ve got the Snaptricity kit, the Motion kit, Green kit, and Arcade Kit—all of which are game changers in hands-on learning.
