The MakerSpace has become extremely popular with the students this year. I have had mostly 7th grade Flex classes coming in, but the demand is becoming more widespread. Two Spanish classes came in to celebrate "Dia de los Muertos" and a rotation of Science classes came in to learn more about cells. There really have been so many creative ideas on how to use the MakerSpace in the library.
In order to get even more teachers interested, my principal and I decided that we would have a MakerSpace faculty meeting. It was held the Monday before Thanksgiving and was a big success. There was a lot of planning that went into it beforehand so that almost 80 teachers could be engaged and learn more about the variety of ways to integrate the MakerSpace into their curriculum. I wanted to make sure that the teachers saw that there is a reason behind learning through play and to help them envision trying new ways of teaching old topics.
Since there was a limited amount of time, I chose what would happen at each station rather than letting them come up with their own ideas. I also sent out information about what a MakerSpace is before the meeting for those that were not familiar. There were 13 stations in total: Dash and Dot Robots, Makey Makey, Little Bits, Cubelets, Snap Circuits, Arts and Crafts, Origami, Osmo, Legos/K'nex, Ozobots, 3D design, zSpace, and Coding websites. The teachers rotated every 6 minutes and were able to get to most stations.
There has been a lot of great feedback from the meeting and hopefully we will have more teachers coming into the Library to use the MakerSpace!
