Pages

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Tinker Zoo Was the Coolest

I'm always looking for an opportunity to participate in professional development activities during the summer. I especially like hands-on experiences--no sit and get for me! This summer I had the opportunity to attend Tinker Zoo Maker Camp at Kalamazoo RESA. The REMC has a great lending library of hands-on maker tools that are available to those who have attended this training. With all the hype about making, I was excited to have a chance to try out some of the hottest toys for myself.

What I liked best about the day was that we had time and space to play. There were stations with plenty of materials and some direction, but there was still lots of room for exploration, experimentation, and creativity. The set up got me thinking about how this can translate to libraries and schools. Where and when do we offer hands-on activities that allow students to work alone and/or collaborate? Are there opportunities to try and fail and try again? Has the messiness of creating and problem-solving been taken over by the scripted nature of school in the era of standardized testing? If so, are libraries, as many have suggested, one of the keys to bringing back more hands-on tinkering to schools?

I don't necessarily know the answers to these questions. My day of training got me interested in doing more exploring and learning. I would especially like to work on how I can support curricular needs, while offering hands-on opportunities within the library space. I recently viewed a tutorial on bookmark making. I'm considering that as a place I might start: simple sewing, gluing, magnets, cutting--with lots of options to create something both useful and personal. It requires a lower monetary investment, but allows for lots of hands-on work.

However, I'm also planning to borrow some items from KRESA and maybe even doing a Donors Choose fundraiser to purchase some items of our own. After all, look at all the fun we had:

We soldered our own blinky robot badges

I thought soldering was awesome. Had to hold myself back from purchasing and soldering iron.

Using straws and connectors to build in 3D. Apparently there is a diecut out there than can be used to create your own connectors. We drove robots over straw bridges.

I liked the littlebits the best. The pieces hook together to make actions happen: ring a buzzer, turn on a light . . . and my favorite: blow bubbles using a fan.



My bubble!

Snap Circuits are a cool way to understand the flow of electricity. 



Ozobots are tiny coding robots. We created color trails and the ozobot would follow our pathways.

The Osmo allowed us to use and iPad to teach coding and gaming. I didn't play with this nearly enough--lots of cool ways to use it.

We have over 100 iPads and I see the possibility of kids getting really into using Bloxels to create characters, worlds, and whole video games. This intrigued me and I saw applications for my students right away.

Dash and Dot are robots that can be taught actions through coding.

No comments:

Post a Comment