Читать книгу The Kickstart Guide to Making GREAT Makerspaces - Laura Fleming - Страница 11

A thematic approach to planning your makerspace ensures that you uncover themes that are unique, relevant, and meaningful to your school community.

Photo courtesy of Gina Seymour

Photo courtesy of Gina Seymour

GREAT makerspaces are personalized and uncover themes that are unique, relevant, and meaningful to your school community. Take, for example, New York high school librarian Gina Seymour, who has adopted the theme of “compassionate making” in her makerspace at Islip High School, in Long Island, New York, which allows her students the opportunity to explore societal themes such as compassion, empathy, and social action through the creation of authentic content and products. Students who want to make a difference in her community visit her MakerCare station to create authentic contents and products. She emphasizes that high-tech makerspaces are not necessary in a school, that all you need to support themes are inexpensive supplies along with children who wish to take action in their community through engaged self-expression.

Another example of a school makerspace with themes that are unique, relevant, and meaningful to a school community is the makerspace at Belgrave Heights Christian School in Melbourne, Australia. Their makerspace, the DC (Discovery Centre), is a place where the school community can gather to imagine, create, explore, invent, tinker, and make. In addition to the themes of construction, engineering, and geography, they also have adopted the theme of faith. This theme allows for student devotion time wrapped around making and exploration.