Monday, June 24, 2013

Design Do Discover 2013 & Intro to Fab Lab


Here in the Bourn Lab, not only do we love designing projects for students, but we also love to connect and collaborate with other educators. What better way to kick off the start of summer than hosting excited, like-minded educators at Castilleja for some making and tinkering fun?

In collaboration with Professor Paulo Blikstein and his crew of graduate students at the Transformative Learning Technologies Lab at Stanford, we held a two-day Intro to Fab Lab workshop for roughly 20 educators. Participants spent one day at Paulo's lab space at Stanford and one day at our Bourn Lab, gaining experience with everything from designing for the laser cutter to soldering to vacuum forming. The final project was a Rube Goldberg machine built by the class using the various digital fabrication machines we had been working with for the past two days. Check out some photos from the workshop below:

To connect with an even larger community of educators around the topic of making and hands-on learning, we also hosted an informal, one-day meeting called Design Do Discover and welcomed a wonderfully energetic group of about 50 attendees, representing not only local Bay Area schools but schools from as far away as Toronto and Hawaii! In the morning, participants engaged in presentations by Bourn Lab staff as well as Fab Lab/makerspace directors from Bishop Strachan School in Canada and Hillbrook School in Los Gatos. Then, in the afternoon, attendees were asked to get their hands dirty to design teaching manipulatives in teams, make mechanical boxes for fun, and play the role of students in sample hands-on lessons led by fellow teachers.


I guess the only left to say is that we can't wait for next summer!