Here’s another excerpt from somebody’s Doctoral dissertation.
Open Community Events
From 2013 to 2015, I organized several pop-up style events that were open to the public. Parents and kids came together at locations including Dallas Makerspace in Dallas, TX, Alpha One Labs in Brooklyn, NY, and Travis Heights Elementary School in Austin, TX to experience a range of hands-on learning opportunities.
These workshops are informed by Seymour Papert’s constructionist theory, which sees “learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge…Learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product.”
A typical event is structured with concurrent workshops, all happening at the same time. They are self-paced and are facilitated by volunteer mentors. These mentors typically come in with no technical expertise in the workshop they’ll be leading, so training is important. A ratio of around five kids to one mentor is ideal. We strongly encouraged parents to stay and participate so they could go deeper into anything they learned when back at home. Since any given event provides only an introduction, it is important for parents and teachers to be able to expand later on what they learned.
These events have included do-it-yourself (DIY) biology experiments like strawberry DNA extraction, prototyping with microelectronics, paper circuits, stop- motion animation, DIY musical instrument creation, robotics, and more. I didn’t invent most of these workshops; there’s a huge community of “maker-focused” educators creating loads of amazing curricula for this sort of thing. However, learning from them has informed my own designs greatly.
In a workshop at Dallas Makerspace the kids learned to create new musical tools, both high-tech and low-tech. In one room kids were creating their own instruments from a pile of donated cardboard boxes, rubber bands, balloons, straws, and glass jars.
In another room kids learned to solder and created contact microphones from piezo disks – a small and extremely cheap electronic component that makes the terrible noise in your smoke alarm. They used these to turn any object in the room– a trash can, a pencil, someone’s face—into an instrument they could run through a guitar amp.
Source:
Dixon, B. R. (2015). Technological doodling as a learning and design practice (Doctoral dissertation).
