Makerspace

Shirley has an extra area within her library designated as a Transformation Space that changes every few weeks. For their next project, Shirley will be challenging her students to build a 9-12 foot wall keyboard using some of the materials she’ll receive from our grant, which include a liter of the Bare Conductive Electric Paint and a Bare Conductive Touch

Coding tools, makerspace materials, and many other STEAM solutions are awesome at getting them to work with their hands and also activating their brains. When special education students see that they can use technology to accomplish a lot of the same things as all the rest of the students in the school, they gain a greater sense of inclusion, learn

Designed for highly inventive students, the Sphero RVR helps them unlock numerous avenues for creativity—namely that they can hack it using just a Raspberry Pi, Arduino board, or micro:bit. That, combined with this unique potential for customization, make this robot a powerful learning tool. Read on to learn more about it and when you can get your hands on one!

Educators are always wondering about the best technology for their classrooms and there isn’t always a definite answer. What’s best for one teacher and group of students depends on learning goals, classroom environment, and previous experiences with EdTech. Watch the video to learn why our Irina Tuule believes EdTech is simply like a pencil.

The MakeDo system is part of a simple cardboard construction kit line that features a bunch of reusable plastic tools. Although it is very simplistic and super low-tech, the ideas and creation possibilities when weaving MakeDo inventions into education are endless. Teachers could even inspire creative play, critical thinking, and problem solving while kids learn by doing.

The recipient of our $500 EdTech grant for the month of June is Jean Daley, a librarian from the Erving Public Library in Erving, MA! Jean is committed to helping the kids in her community learn more about and with technology and will now be able to introduce them to coding and learning in new ways!

For this week’s Eduporium Experiment, we’re playing around with the KEVA Contraptions Set, a pretty big box that’s not high-tech but still offers a high ceiling for STEM learning. KEVA has a few different kits available for students and teachers and the main features of each is the same. Keep reading to learn more about these low-tech STEAM tools.

Covering four specific areas (science, math, technology, and computer science), these kits help ensure students grasp key concepts through scaffolded and engaging activities! Keep reading to learn more about each of these expansion packs and why they’re a good option for any STEAM-loving, littleBits-using teacher.

Recently, we’ve been able to learn more about and sample the Kid Spark STEM kits, which, collectively, do a great job of painting a more robust picture of STEM education. With engineering, technology, and even programming at the heart of these kits, they’re a great way to bring STEM into your learning environment!

It’s become increasingly common for schools to feature these types of spaces, which are designed to promote hands-on tinkering, breaking, collaboration, failure, problem solving, and creative invention using any assortment of MakerEd tools. In fab labs, students are free to create whatever they want in essentially any way that they want.