Brian C. Smith's List: making

• it is not easy to find the right language to explain how I think I am different from the "touchy feely ... make it fun make it easy" approaches to education.
• "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo." I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.
• Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do.
• These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don't let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world.
• I have written here about adolescents in Maine's juvenile correctional facility overcoming their long standing aversion to any sort of school learning by being given the opportunity to invent and construct sophisticated mechanical/robotic devices. Doing this requires concentration and discipline. It requires learning to deal with things going wrong by finding out how to fix the problem rather than by giving up in frustration. And for some of those kids it has meant experiencing for the first time the pleasure of writing because they were encouraged to write about something they were doing themselves and doing with passion.
• We are talking here about a special kind of fun ... "hard fun."

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• “The best projects push up against the resistance of reality. They work or they don’t work.”

• Dr. Stager, the executive director of The Constructivist Consortium, has helped learners of all ages embrace the power of computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression.  

   

   
  

   

   His belief is that children are capable of doing extraordinary things, but that our current education system does not provide them with ways to learn in a "natural, more fluid way."
• "The endless time-wasting is staggering," said Dr. Stager, referring to a system that he believes doesn't provide enough intensity and creative learning for children.
• "We have a perfect storm that's swirling outside of our school buildings,"
• "This technology revolution has an added benefit of being great for kids and rejuvenating teachers and reinvigorating education.
• There's never been a cooler time to learn."
• a form of "apprentice expertise,"
• where one gets to see people in their natural surroundings, discover what drives them and see what it is they do. It's also an opportunity, he added, to energize young people and to give them a chance to shine as well as to receive a mentoring experience they might not get in real life.
• Constructing Modern Knowledge, a minds-on institute for educators committed to creativity, collaboration and computing
• Engaging students in hands-on projects using computers ensures that students will make more interesting things
• believes that students who are makers will have the ability to solve their own problems, forge their own path and be passionate about what they do.
• "Most of what we are doing with computers in schools is incredibly disappointing,"
• As a result, children have no chance to "get lost in something and to develop expertise."

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• "My goal is more about inspiration than education," he says. "I don't believe you can just pour knowledge into students. They have to learn things by trying them out."
• "Think about the driver and the passenger in a car," says Adele Diamond, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia and one of the founders of the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience. "The driver is hands-on and the passenger does what students normally do in class, which is sit passively. The driver will learn the route better because she has to actively use the information."
• engaged and enlightened tinkering is disappearing from contemporary American childhood.
• "It's getting harder and harder for teachers who want to do experiential learning -- there are so many limits being placed on what they can teach because of high stakes testing," says Eleanor Duckworth, Ph.D., a cognitive psychologist and professor of education at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, who herself came to hands-on learning in the 1960s when -- after years of training and working with developmental psychologist Jean Piaget -- she began studying elementary school science and learned all the concepts by doing them herself.
• After school, children are being pushed to specialize in anything from year-round hockey to flute at younger and younger ages, depriving them of what child development experts view as a crucial task of childhood -- trying a range of things to discover what appeals to you.
• "Making creates evidence of learning," says Dale Dougherty, the founder and publisher of Make. "Students are taking an idea and substantiating it in a way that could be a sketch or a model or something else. That process gives them a lot of feedback."
• The key, as with all of hands-on learning, is for the grownups not to do what really should be the child's work.

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• That stuff that can’t be “Khanified.”
• But I’d argue the bigger problem is there is no vision.

• The key, as with all of hands-on learning, is for the grownups not to do what really should be the child’s work. “We want to teach kids that they have a lot of answers inside of them,” says Jason Chua, one of SparkTruck’s founders. “If you don’t get things right the first time it’s OK to continue prototyping and iterating until you find a solution that makes sense.”

   

   

   

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• There is growing recognition that hands-on learning experiences are critical to the development of young minds.
• The Maker Education Initiative is dedicated to the noble idea that every child is a maker and that making and education belong together. This new non-profit organization seeks to promote more opportunities for children and teens to grow as makers in their own community — and to be connected to a worldwide community of makers who share their projects.
• At each Maker Faire, we see so many children and teens inspired by what they see and experience — the amazing creativity and technical wizardry evident in all the projects at Maker Faire. They see how science and technology can be fun, fascinating and relevant to their own lives.
• Making combines creativity and critical thinking, which are at the heart of 21st-century learning but making also reflects John Dewey’s famous 20th Century insight that we “learn by doing”.
• Making can take place at home or in school, or at any number of locations in the community such as science centers, children’s museums, libraries, clubs and community centers.
• The Maker Education Initiative will support the development of programs that reach children and teens in all of these settings.
• The Maker Education Initiative will especially focus on programs that reach disadvantaged and disengaged youth who we want to be part of the maker movement.

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