Tag Archives: Making For Educators

22Mar 2019

Marble Machine Boards

Inspired by the Tinkering Studio’s Instructable Make a Marble Machines Board, we set about to construct three of them for our Making for Educators class. I designed a custom foot, which we cut from 1/4″ plywood on the laser cutter in our makerspace. I put the file up on Thingiverse, in case you want to download it.

The feet include 1/4″ holes, so that dowels can be used to support marble machine elements down low.

We’re pretty space constrained in the Innovation Center, so we need to be able to remove the feet so as to store these marble machine boards flat when not in use. If I had it to do over again, I would have used pronged t-nuts, but we had already affixed the pegboards to the frames, so these insert nuts will do fine.

Students spent a little bit of time in class this week working on their machines, sawing and cutting wood and foam and PVC pipe…

…and beginning to attach their tracks.

We introduced the idea of embedding Makey Makey into their machines, and they’ll have more time to work on them in the next class session.

15Feb 2019

Pizza Box Pinball, Mycelium, Tourists, Palentine’s Day, and Beer

by Zack ⋅ Leave a Comment

Sometimes it seems like there are too many things happening in the Innovation Center to keep track of. This week felt like that. Here’s a recap:

Students in our new ECE course Making for Educators started working on their cardboard pinball machines, which they’ll finish up in our next class session.

Max (student and amateur mycologist) harvested and cooked some pink oyster mushrooms, and pasteurized and inoculated some oat straw, packing it into our first two 4″ pot prototypes, which we made using a 3D printer and our vacuum former.

Some snazzy new stainless steel fermenting vessels arrived, and Max Mahoney (Chemistry professor and makerspace champion) assembled one in preparation for another brewing day as part of our fermentation science efforts.

Our staff hosted a Palentine’s Day Crafternoon event.

Finally, visitors from both College of Alameda FabLab and Lichen K-8 came out to tour our space and talk about making…

A busy week, and the semester is just getting rolling.

06Feb 2019

Tinkering in the ECE Classroom

by Zack ⋅ 1 Comment

This semester, Jennifer Kraemer (professor of Early Childhood Education and makerspace champion) and I are teaching a new course we developed – Making For Educators – for the first time, a hands-on course to help educators incorporate making into their teaching practice. It’s the second of our discipline-lensed making courses, including Making Social Change, a Sociology course we’ve taught now twice, in which students explore social movements and the ways that those movements use tools to enact change. For ECE 452, we’re using the excellent Invent to Learn by Sylvia Libow Martinez (@smartinez) and Gary Stager, Ph. D. (@garystager) as our text, and the class meets in the makerspace.

Our most recent class session was focused on tinkering. Martinez and Stager define tinkering thus:

Tinkering is a mindset – a playful way to approach and solve problems through direct experience, iteration, experimentation, and discovery.

At the start of the class, we talked about the relationship between tinkering, making and engineering, shared some examples, and after a very brief discussion of safety – no plugging things in! – students chose an item from a pile of broken and obsolete printers, laptops and desktop computers, tape and optical drives, and other electronic detritus, and began the process of unscrewing cases, cutting cables, and generally deconstructing their items.

Most students worked independently, content to explore the guts of their chosen electronic devices, but a pair of students decided to work together, taking apart a tape backup drive…

and knolling the parts.

Students settled quickly into the work, and were laughing and sharing and generally having a good time. Unsurprisingly perhaps, many reported never having seen the inside of a laptop or DVD drive, and they were excited to explore. At the end of the session, we asked them to share their thoughts and feelings as they tinkered.

Students shared feelings of pride and satisfaction, and described the activity as therapeutic, relaxing, savage, confusing, and cathartic. After almost two years of development, it’s satisfying (and therapeutic, relaxing, savage, confusing, and cathartic) to get this class up and running, and we’re looking forward to learning alongside these brave and creative students.