Maker Blog

 Benefits of incorporating Maker Education -

Maker Education allows us to utilize much more hands on approaches, for those with impairments like blindness or just as a hands approach for those who may prefer it. We were shown an example of this at class at our Maker studio at Coe, A, if I recall, one to one scale of the brain was for a blind student so they could understand the location of hemispheres in the brain, we also used our hands to build structures, which allowed our hands to do as much thinking as our brain. The addition of Maker in education allows us and students to bring ideas and represent things physically rather than just visually. 

However, challenges that come to mind, one to me is price and actually utilizing the tools, like our 3D printer. Those are pretty dang expensive, even having one would have some hefty long term expenses, due to maintenance and materials based on usage, my high school had a whole class that involved 3d printing and I'm sure it wasn't cheap. Another challenge would be getting students to want to use them, taking the time to teach students this very complicated process that they're never required to use, and selling this idea to the school would be tough for the same reasons, even if you can use MAKER tech to help students with disabilities, those students are the minority, so it would be difficult to sell as an idea, becoming more and more difficult the less students with the most to gain from this there are.

One lesson plan I thought of was having student make an aerodynamic object, this would start with learning about what traveling through the air is like,  air resistance, what things can fly, etc. We will learn this by studying creatures that can fly like Birds and Insects (Bees are an anomaly) with the end goal being that students can identify the idea that mass and shape have an effect on aerodynamics, I will assess their learning by doing a fun little game where students get on a Kahoot and identify aerodynamic objects. once everyone has done this and has demonstrated understanding of what allows a thingie (technical term) to fly. 

To Follow this lesson up, students will be taught the basics of 3D shape editing software, how 3D printers work, and what we can do with them. Learning about the frankly absurd things that people have done with 3D printers (like make houses and cars) will be our hook, maybe we even browse some 3D models that people have made to really spark their interest. In order to practice, students will be tasked with some standard polygons that they have all seen before, where, once finished, we'll fling 'em with a catapult, letting people see why the triangle for example flew the longest (lower mass and points to cut through air resistance) then, now that they understand their end goal (make an object that flies further than the triangle) 

Obviously for this lesson, we'd need a 3D printer, a catapult (made with the 3D printer), 3D software, materials for the 3D printer, and somewhere to launch potentially pointy shapes. The critical skills I want to emphasize is analysis and problem solving, this is why we launch objects that we know aren't;t optimal for flight, since even the students know this, they'll want to really one up the regular polygon shapes and that should engage them quite a lot. If a student just "Doesn't get it", maybe they don't understand the software or the aerodynamicness of an object, we can support them by modifying the assignment, rather than make an object, find an object and tell us why you think it would go further than this object. 

PS - terribly sorry this is over a week late, I don't have a good excuse, home stretch just messed me up I guess