Here's the

online handout for the Introduction to CCWP's Make Collaboration

We are entering our second year of a collaboration with NWP and the Maker Faire/Make Magazine. The Maker Faire is the largest celebration of the "Do It Yourself" (DIY) movement in the world, happening every year at the San Mateo Event Center in May. The CCWP Make Team was to privileged attend the Friday Education Day at last year's Maker Faire, and we had a blast.

 The basic premise of the Maker Project is that students can learn to write clearly and effectively if they are given the opportunity to discover how to build or do something with value and interest in their own lives, and then tasked with teaching others the skills they used to complete their project.

While there are contemporary tools involved in the discovery process and in the formatting of the media used to communicate about their learning, the roots of this approach to education are in the constructivist and project-based movements.

 Pause to write and reflect:

Recall a time when you learned a practical, real-world skill. Who taught you? Why were you learning to do this? Did you ever have to teach your new skill to another, and if so, what was the teaching experience like?

There are two essential elements to a "Maker approach" to learning:

1) Student choice and agency – projects need to be developed with at least input from (if not free choice by) students, so that student interest levels are high and there is a sense of agency on the part of the student creators

2) Once the process of making is learned, it is also taught to others

These two aspects of the work are not separated, rather they are interwoven throughout the process: students need to understand from the outset that they will be required to teach the skills they are acquiring, and time needs to be allocated along the way for reflection, documentation, and testing and collaboration about how best to develop the instructional materials which are as much a part of the project as the things being built.

A practical exercise: learn and then teach a string game.

 As an example that can be realized in a short workshop like this, we will learn a simple string game and then practice teaching it to someone else.

Resources for the Maker Collaboration:

An interview with Henry Jenkins:

http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/an_interview_with_david_gauntl.html

The NWP Connect space for the national Make Collaboration:

http://connect.nwp.org/nwp-makes