Another cool “shop class” is at Austin Polytech in Chicago’s West Side. There, teens learn high-tech manufacturing and computer engineering skills alongside their math, English, and art classes. They graduate ready to work with a certificate that is widely recognized by manufacturers. They also have the benefit of a direct pipeline into a job and further training and education (the employers agree to foot the bill) at one of the local manufacturers who partner with the school.

In Pittsburgh, with its legacy of “Rust Belt” manufacturing, the options are even more inventive. At Shaler Area Elementary School, students get to travel back in time, through space, or under the sea as part of Dream Flight Adventures, “an immersive learning environment that challenges students to use all of their right- and left-brain skills, plus lots of team work, to solve complex problems.”

Elsewhere in the area, students can use the robot-building program Arts & Bots in classrooms to bring their lessons alive. One teacher, for example, had her students create a robotic model of the right arm bones, constructing muscles from pantyhose or red craft foam and tendons from rubber bands. Students learned how muscles functioned, as well as how to program the muscles to move with the Hummingbird circuit board, sensors, servos, and LED lights.

Not to be outdone, students at Clairton High School’s robotics class recently made it to the quarterfinals at the National BotsIQ Competition. Stephen Botos, vice president of sales and marketing at Aerotech Inc., invited the kids to tour their O’Hara factory and learn about robotics and automation careers. Or there’s Senqué A. Little-Poole, a student at the Pittsburgh Science & Technology Academy, who has clearly found his passion in science. His creations were recently honored at the recent White House Science Fair.

Teachers are implementing programs in their classrooms that integrate art and design into STEM and digital learning projects thanks to a series of STEAM grants (A for art) provided by the Allegheny Intermediate Unit and the Center for Creativity.

All of these programs are focusing on STEM in new ways and in new forums. Rather than learning science, technology, engineering, and math from a textbook, kids learn by doing.

The efforts focus on STEM for good reason. A forthcoming Brookings report finds that STEM jobs that require less than a bachelor’s degree pay 10-15 percent higher wages than jobs with similar educational requirements, an average of more than $50,000 annually. The wage premium is even greater with a college degree. Furthermore, a STEM-based economy is not only good for the individual. It raises wages and lowers unemployment in the entire metro area.

Pittsburgh is primed for this renaissance, starting as it does with a rich manufacturing history. This history creates the roots of an innovator class. The same Brookings report notes that ”High-skilled blue-collar and technical STEM workers have made, and continue to make outsized contributions to innovation.”

Although the blue-collar worker tinkering in the garage is no longer the driver of new patents, he or she is essential to the production, testing, and designing of new innovation. Seeding the next generation of manufacturers can continue the rebirth of Pittsburgh and the region.

Today, the Brookings authors write, there are two STEM economies—the one that requires an advanced degree and the one that does not. The latter draws from high schools, workshops, vocational schools, and community colleges. These workers are the linchpin in the innovation cycle, implementing the new ideas and advising researchers on feasibility of design options, cost estimates, and other practical aspects. They’re innovators in their own right.

We hear a lot about fostering “21st-century skills.” But those skills are not confined to Advanced Placement courses. The kinds of programs in Pittsburgh, Utah, and Chicago are also part of the mix, as are the numerous afterschool opportunities to make and create. These programs are providing kids with the hands-on learning that can help them figure out what they want to do with their lives, and instill the critical thinking skills that will ensure their jobs are evolving, challenging, and participatory.

As Tony Wagner, author of “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World” told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman:

“The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content … but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.’ ”

Kids today, if they are to find their vocation and passion, not to mention a semblance of job security, will always need to master the three Rs. “But,” says Wagner, “they will need skills and motivation even more.… Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously.”

I’d wager that those kids on the airplane or in the robotic competition are learning not only how to think, but the joys of intrinsic motivation and the deep satisfaction that come from discovery through play, tinkering, exploring—of figuring out how something works.

“Reimagining schools for the 21st-century,” Wagner continues, “must be our highest priority. We need to focus more on teaching the skill and will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and purpose.”

“It’s a little bit disheartening that some schools have all sorts of resources available to them and we have to work for it,” said Clairton robotics team member Amanda Gillespie.  “But in another way, it’s a good thing because in life you have to work for things.” Gillespie is a senior at the high school, and has been involved in other Hive youth programming.

Clairton is one of the state’s smallest and poorest school districts, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and could not afford the trip—about $4,000 for lodging, food, transportation, and other competition fees. They also needed around $1,000 extra to buy spare parts for their fighting robots but their fundraising had stalled until an article ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette detailing their financial situation.

“It’s amazing the support that we’ve seen,” industrial arts teacher at Clairton and Robotics Club sponsor Dennis Beard told the Post-Gazette.

More than 100 strangers, some from as far away as California, donated an amazing $58,000 to the Clairton Robotics Club’s cause. This kind of outpouring shows how important STEM is to people and companies, and not only in Pittsburgh.

Less than a month ago, the Chrysler Foundation provided nearly $30,000 in grants to support 10 Michigan high school robotics teams that had qualified for the 2013 FIRST Robotics Competition. Meanwhile, a community organization in Dansville, KY donated to their local Wayland-Cohocton Robotics Team to cover next year’s operating expenses, which typically provide for new parts for the robots such as motors and gearboxes.

Parents, teachers, business owners, and others in communities across the country know how important it is that we prepare our students for STEM careers. As Mohammad Qayoumi, president of San Jose State University, wrote recently:

Over the next 10 years, 5 out of 8 new jobs and 8 out of 10 of the highest paying positions in the United States will be in careers related to science, technology, education, and math (STEM) subjects.

But in a decade the United States could face a shortage of one million STEM graduates. The nation’s economic vitality hangs in the balance.

And, as he wrote, “A major barrier to graduating more STEM majors is the way we teach these disciplines.”

The kinds of competitions and clubs like the students at Clairton enjoy are one way to hook students, but we need to do an equally good job of showing students that what they learn in a robotics class translates directly back to algebra or geometry or computer science. Making that connection is a key element of a new “connected learning” movement. In this working theory, the key is to start with teens’ interests, focus on production-centered activities, and provide them with strong mentors and adults who can help them make the critical links from what they’re tinkering with and what happens in school (or even later in the workforce). At the center is the internet and digital media tools that boost the ability of teens to share their work and learn from and connect with others.

Meanwhile, the Clairton team made it to the quarterfinals this past weekend before being knocked off. A big congratulations is in order. We know they’ll be back next year.

With help from her parents and three younger siblings, the charismatic 11-year-old, and self-proclaimed maker, has taught viewers everything from making copper-etched circuit boards to screen printing—all using household items easily found at a craft or grocery store. “I would say we spend maybe $100 a year,” Sylvia’s dad told the New York Times. “We don’t have a lot of money for this; really, it just takes time.”

It’s the homemade, DIY approach of the show, along with Sylvia’s irresistible personality, that has made it such a success—now surpassing 1.5 million views on YouTube. Since her show first aired just 19 episodes ago, Sylvia has become a sought-after speaker for TedX conferences and was hired by Make Magazine to produce episodes for their website. Most recently, she was one of only 100 students invited by President Obama to participate in the White House Science Fair. “Not bad for an 11-year-old,” noted Bhanoo, and she’s right. Not bad at all.

Sylvia, like many other self-taught makers, attributes her interest in science to an innate curiosity, although her passion for making began to grow after attending Maker Faire when she was only five. “Ever since I was really young I liked destroying stuff,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in making and doing things hands-on.”

This kind of unabashed excitement for learning is using what researchers Rich Halverson and Benjamin Shapiro at the University of Wisconsin-Madison call “technologies for learners” as opposed to “technologies for education.” The latter include student information management systems, adaptive learning software, and computerized assessment tools. Technologies for learners, however, are designed to support the specific needs, goals, and learning styles of curious individuals—like Sylvia.

Author and DIY learning expert Anya Kamenetz cited Halverson and Shapiro’s work in a recent post on the Digital blog for the Hechinger Report, stating that these self-inspired learners “use online multimedia production and social media to pursue their own interests, express themselves, and connect with others to exchange knowledge.” She also explained that this kind of learning often takes place outside of school, which, according to researchers, should come as no surprise:

The authors note that the data-driven “accountability” rhetoric so dominant in education reform both is part of, and compels the spread of, technologies for education. But since the benefits of self-directed, creative, and project-based learning don’t necessarily show up on standardized test scores, accountability pushes schools away from technologies for learners.

Up-and-coming alternative assessment tools, like Mozilla’s badges, have become an antidote for the lack of technologies for learners in schools, providing ways for autodidacts or “self-learners” like Sylvia to receive credit for skills that may not be recognized by standardized test scores.

But what is it about hands-on, self-directed experimentation that affords such effective learning experiences? Is it because students are choosing the topics they want to explore and doing it in their own way, on their own time? As Shapiro, Halverson, and Kamenetz suggested, more research delving into these questions is ultimately the only way to find out what it is about technology and hands-on learning that can be so transformative for students.

Halverson and Shapiro specifically advocate for a reformed research agenda that could provide evidence supporting the adoption of technologies for learners within schools. Regardless of whether we can expect these technologies in classrooms anytime soon, one thing is for sure: Sylvia’s love for learning is infectious, as is the case for any passionate maker, and it is this kind of fervor for knowledge that must be cultivated in both formal and informal learning spaces.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs), offered for free through Ivy League universities, have attracted several million students since they were first offered in 2011. Organizations like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research began cropping up, offering noncredit graduate-level liberal arts arts classes for a fraction of a traditional college’s price. Prospective students are beginning to explore their options and consider their higher education paths as more of an economical decision than ever before. As author of DIY U Anya Kamenetz said to Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Belkin, “It’s a little bit like the 1960s and ‘70s on college campuses right now… There’s a lot of unrest and students are looking for alternatives.”

An alternative is just the thing Tim Cook, founding director of Pittsburgh’s Saxifrage School, is looking to provide.

Cook developed his school, which uses spaces within the community as its classrooms, to unite the ideological development gained from a humanities education with the more marketable, production-oriented education oft afforded through studying the sciences—all for a fraction of the cost. Cook explained this concept in a recent op-ed for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Those of us who work in production should be trained to think critically and ask big questions about our work. Likewise, the academics among us must not be confined to the ivory tower; our critiques and artistic perspectives should be put into practice and grounded in the world of made things. We must learn to make what is valuable and to question the value of what is made.

And the idea, while it may seem radical, has been quite well thought out. Cook and his colleagues published a comprehensive list of reasons why they opened the new antiestablishment college, including the importance of a community-oriented education that is profitable for both educators and students. “What’s the point of spending a fortune to reinvent the wheel?” Cook said to Belkin. “Everything you need to operate a campus is already right there in the community.”

One of Cook’s goals is for Saxifrage students to ask, “What is the common good and how can I work to serve it?” He and his school are just another facet of the movement to provide an ecosystem of learning opportunity for today’s learners, along with MOOCs and Hive networks.

Mozilla’s badge system has been another momentous force to the cause, providing a way for students and self-directed learners to receive a kind of “real world credit” for skills that are not necessarily taught in schools. People of all ages are now able to display these badges, which are provided through local and national organizations alike, in their very own portfolio, which they can then use when applying for schools or future jobs. Mind/Shift writer Ian Quillen explained Mozilla’s impetus behind the new open-platform assessment tools:

The idea behind Mozilla’s project is to create a common currency of how badges are structured and discussed. While Mozilla can’t — nor does it want to — control the quality of the elements required for badges listed within its project, it does require every badge to provide authentication for the organization issuing the badge and for the user receiving it, as well as a link to the criteria needed to earn it and the evidence of the learner meeting that criteria.

These new and exciting alternatives of assessing and developing skills will undoubtedly do wonders for what some have called a “broken” system, there is of course room for skepticism. Hack Education writer Audrey Watters explained that many who insist that higher education is a “bad investment” are forgetting about many of the other factors that are at play when it comes to networking or trying to “make it” on your own without a four-year degree to lean on.

“The ‘don’t go to school’ narrative is often quick to brush aside the ways in which gender, race, class, and ability afford privilege and complicate alternatives,” said Watters. “No doubt, most of us do not live the lives of the ‘don’t go to school’ poster-boys (and yes, they are boys) — Gates, Zuckerberg, and the like.”

Watters further explained that by relying on the Internet to become a “self-taught” or “self-made” success, like the men she just mentioned, we are ignoring the complex networks of privilege that many have access to, regardless of their higher education decisions. Watters also explains that, despite how easy it may be for some to learn new skills on the internet, many people are not “autodidacts,” and that a four-year education might be the smartest choice for them.

Regardless of the arguments for and against formal colleges and universities, the fact that there are other options available for today’s students is exciting and will undeniably help create a more diverse landscape for higher education, with schools like Cook’s and others creating new opportunities for learners everywhere.

Equipped with vinyl cutters, mini mills, and 3D printers, among other high-tech tools, fab labs have been cropping up across the globe. Hesse reported that there are currently 150 fab labs around the world, and 150 more are under construction. While they certainly signify a kind of raw excitement both in and outside the maker community, some, like Gershenfeld and others, believe they represent a third industrial revolution.

Chris Anderson, former editor in chief of Wired magazine, makes this argument in his new book “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution,” which delves into the impact of tinkerers on the U.S. economy.

“We’ve had two industrial revolutions,” said Anderson. “The first was the mechanical one, which replaced muscle power with machine power. The second was the computer revolution, replacing brain power with machine power.” Now, says Anderson, we are embarking on a third, which places the focus back on manufacturing—except, this time, with the aid of “smart machines.”

“The loftier goal of the fab lab is to reintroduce humans to the tactile experience of creation, a complicated goal in this age when hand-held mallets have been replaced by computer-controlled tools,” explains Hesse, who believes that fab labs will encourage people to question what it means to be “useful” in the 21^st century.

If this is a signifier of the third industrial revolution, it is important for students to have access to these spaces and their accompanying mentors and tools. The “value of making” is one that experts, educators, and makers themselves have been trying to instill into young people. The hope is that one day there will be generations of workforce-ready content producers who are adept at using the tools afforded by advanced technology in a way that benefits their surrounding communities.

The problem? These labs obviously come with an expensive price tag, with 3D printers like the ShopBot costing more than $27,000. Luckily, a few policymakers have made it their business to see fab labs flourish. Illinois congressman (and physicist) Bill Foster, for example, recently proposed a bill vying for a National Fab Lab Network that would help provide funds and resources to fab labs across the country.

Foster was a successful teenage maker himself. He started a theatrical lighting company with his brother when we was 19 that now makes more than half of the theater lights in the country. He explained his impetus to back the bill, and to support the maker movement:

When I was a kid, you’d take apart lawn mowers, or rebuild hot rods, or take apart old radio and television sets and reconfigure the circuits to build wonderful, dangerous things. But that’s not available to kids today…. You can’t really take apart an iPhone and reconfigure the parts to do something wonderful. The most you can do is reprogram it with new apps. But it’s not the same as holding something you’ve designed.

If it passes, the National Fab Lab Network Act would, as Hesse put it, treat the labs like Little League or the VFW—“facilitating their creation, vetting prospective founders, matching donors with projects,” all of which are necessary to ensure the success of future the labs.

The new legislation is not the only financial boon to fab labs, either. The Hampton Township School District, located just outside of Pittsburgh, received a $20,000 grant in 2012 to design a mini fab lab of its own. The grant—which pertains to science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics—was made available through The Center for Creativity and the Grable and Benedum Foundations. The grant will not only cover the construction of the fab lab, but will also fund the purchase of computer-aided design software, iPads, and laptops that will be compatible with the advanced technology in their new lab.

“The new lab will expand the district’s transition from a traditional technology education program to one with an engineering focus to help introduce engineering and computer science careers and spark student interest in those fields,” wrote reporter Bethany Hofstetter for TribLive.com.

I don’t know about you, but I can hardly imagine having access to such tools as an elementary or middle school student. The opportunity that these tools and spaces provide to students—one that encourages them to build whatever they want—is awe-inspiring, and it’s this kind of inherent excitement stemming from the fab labs that has given the movement so much momentum. It kind of makes one wonder: How could we know about these opportunities and not make them available to students?

In their introduction to “Design, Make, Play: Growing the Next Generation of STEM Innovators,” Margaret Honey and David Kanter wrote this about makers and the zeitgeist behind their movement:

All together, makers are seeking an alternative to being regarded as consumers, rejecting the idea that you are defined by what you buy. Instead, makers have a sense of what they can do and what they can learn to do. Like artists, they are motivated by internal goals, not extrinsic rewards. They are inspired by the work of others.

If that isn’t an outstanding ideal for future generations, I’m not sure what is.

The school day started early, with breakfast for the children. The school had afterschool programs in a variety of realms. It involved parents heavily. And it had Saturday and summer programs. Not only was it providing a haven for neighborhood children to stay clear of the gangs and other threats, but it was making school a central part of the families’ lives.

This approach, it turns out, is quite successful in increasing the performance of low-income children, as Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane write in the opening chapter of “Whither Opportunity?” But this approach is not easy. It is time-consuming, requires resources, and turns on well-trained teachers and innovative administrators. This is one reason, they write, why schools that dramatically improve the life chances of poor kids are the exception—and are often unable to sustain that success.

This concept of enveloping children in all things school and learning is apparent in another realm: after school. The Hive Learning Network is one model for doing that. The Hive is a group of cultural and youth-serving organizations in a city—currently Pittsburgh, New York, and Chicago, with more on the way—that are deliberately stitched together with coordinated programming to create a well-integrated ecosystem of learning opportunities, anywhere, anytime. Hives are founded on the belief that kids will follow their interests and learn by doing, and cities need to make sure that kids and their families can find those opportunities to develop those interests.

Hive Pittsburgh kicked off officially last week with our summer learning initiative Hive Days of Summer. And we were pleased to see this piece from EdWeek blogger Tom Vander Ark who spotlighted the work going on here to connect maker, digital and STEAM learning both in and outside of the classroom.

In a forthcoming book, Duncan and Murnane call for an educational infrastructure to support and sustain success in reducing the learning gap among low-income children. The infrastructure is the scaffolding that ensures that teachers and principals are supported and that provides the guidance and resources to sustain their efforts.

In each case, the participating schools benefited from significant educational infrastructure.  In one case, it comes from a school district’s Department of Early Childhood, in a second from a charter management organization, and in a third from a combination of not-for-profit organizations set up to support schools and from community partners.

In many respects, the Hive members are part of that infrastructure if they work to ensure that what the children learn in the out-of-school space makes it back into the classroom and supplements what the children are learning there. Pittsburgh is leading the charge in making sure that happens. The city’s programs and public schools are working in tandem to ensure that what the kids learn in and out of school meshes.

This infrastructure and the connection back into the classroom is also one element of “connected learning,” the theory guiding many of the Hive Networks. While there’s a lot of ideas and concepts in connected learning, one sticks out for me: the ability to weave together a path of engagement for kids, with school being just one node on that network of learning opportunities.

It seems that if kids can follow their interests and learn about color or electronics or whales in the museums and programs outside of school, and if they can continue to follow that interest with the help of mentors and teachers, they might become more engaged in school, and with that half the battle is won. The other half, of course, will always be the continued support of our classrooms and of those who spend their days ensuring that the next generation has a strong start off the blocks.

Last year, Pittsburgh Today ran a six part series on building the entrepreneurial economy. The series quoted a Mellon Foundation report, “Pittsburgh is on the verge of reaching a critical mass in terms of the number of successful start-up companies, entrepreneurs, availability of local early stage capital and ability to push and pull university technologies to market.”

Maker Hive. The MacArthur Foundation selected Pittsburgh as the third city to host a Hive Learning Network (along with NYC and Chicago). Hive Pittsburgh launched on Friday with a three month summer learning initiative. Hive Days of Summer activities will turn city sites into a “maker” camp for teens. The three month initiative launched Friday. Summer activities will turn city sites into a “maker” camp for teens.

Hive Pittsburgh is just one of many innovative learning initiatives happening in Pittsburgh. Tweens and teens have access to maker learning in MakeShop, STEAM learning at Assemble, on-line literacy games at community libraries, multimedia training at the LABS at the Carnegie Libraries, a Robotics Academy at Carnegie Mellon University, and even music remixing at Hip Hop on LOCK.

TechShop , a big maker success from Menlo Park ( featured on Bloomberg last week), recently opened a new location in Pittsburgh’s Bakery Square.

There’s also been a recent building boom of digital and maker learning spaces in public schools across the region:

• Shaler School District: Dream Flight Simulator;
• Elizabeth Forward School District: Entertainment Technology Academy, SMALLab, and “YouMedia” library; and
• Carlyton School District: the STEAM Studio at Crafton Elementary School.

And it doesn’t just end with students. The Allegheny Intermediate Unit is transforming professional development with TransformeED – a digital playground for teachers to provide inspiration of how they can bring technology and maker practices into the classroom. And parents can get support through organizations ranging from the Fred Rogers Center to WQED Multimedia.

Pittsburgh educators, innovators and organizations have come together to form the Kids+Creativity Network – more than 100 organizations, including public school districts, non-profit groups, libraries, museums, afterschool programs and neighborhood community centers – which is committed to “remaking learning” in the greater Pittsburgh area.

Read the whole post at Vander Ark on Innovation.

Hive Days of Summer kicks off today Friday, May 3rd at the Warhol Museum’s Youth Invasion as teens take over the museum for a night. This multi-faceted project features teen’s unique take on Andy Warhol, with their points of view, ideas, and creative expressions infusing the energizing the entire museum – its programming, interpretation, and display. Highlights of the program are the fashion show, performances by multiple local teen groups, youth-designed and facilitated activities, and a dance party.

“Hive Pittsburgh is creating connected learning opportunities that demonstrate the impact digital tools, design thinking and real world experiences can have on the way young people learn and socialize,” said Cathy Lewis Long, Executive Director of The Sprout Fund, the agency implementing Hive Pittsburgh. “Summer is the perfect time to engage teens outside of the classroom and create experiences in community libraries, museums, art venues, and other spaces to help them foster the creative and technology skills needed to thrive in our digital economy.”

When schools close their doors for summer, Hive Pittsburgh will be there to ensure the continuity of learning. Hive Days of Summer programs will provide teens with opportunities to develop necessary 21st century skills and engage in learning that encourages them to explore their interests, create their own creative works, and share what they make with their peers.

Get Involved with Hive Days of Summer

A limited number of Hive Days of Summer sponsorships will be made available to support Kids+Creativity Network members who wish to participate in the campaign. We’re looking for teen programs happening at museums, libraries, summer camps, community centers, parks, schools, and teen spaces of all kinds. Contact us via connect@nullsproutfund.org to express your interest.

Follow Hive on Twitter @hivepgh to stay up-to-date on Hive Days of Summer activities and opportunities.

“As part of our non-profit mission, Mozilla believes that web literacy—the understanding of how digital things work—is an essential life skill for the 21st century,” Mozilla said in a message promoting the launch of Teach the Web. “We want to empower users of the web to become makers of the web.”

Teach the Web participants will explore new ways of teaching digital literacies through making and learning together, including how to:

• teach digital literacies through making, remixing and sharing

• incorporate openness and online innovation into teaching practices

• adapt educational resources to meet your learners’ interests and needs

• receive feedback from peers on your own resources and lessons

Find more details or sign up and get started at http://webmaker.org/teach, join the Google+ Community at mzl.la/gpluswebmaker, and reach out via Twitter @mozteach.

If you decide to dig in and become your own Webmaker, let us know how it goes. We’d love to hear how Kids+Creativity Network members are using these tools to teach the web in their learning programs. Share your stories, feedback, ideas, and questions with us via email to news@nullsproutfund.org or twitter @remakelearning.

The MAKESHOP opened in 2011 as a space within the Museum for visitors to experiment with real tools, materials, and creative process at the intersection of the physical and the digital. These explorations often lead to making tangible products or projects. We’re part of a growing movement of Makerspaces around the country working to promote more opportunities for making and to help better understand how children and families learn through making.

Our permanent exhibit design was built after extensive prototyping with visitors. The MAKESHOP is intended to welcome and engage visitors of all ages, genders, and levels of ability and to encourage collaboration across generations.

Families love the MAKESHOP. Kevin, one of our talented teaching artists, wrote a blog post about repeat visitors Aiden, Thomas, and their dad, who travel all the way from Buffalo, NY, to regularly visit the museum. They come to work on stop-motion animation with a dry erase board.

Photo: Vaughn Wallace

We also work with schools and teachers to meaningfully integrate making experiences into their Museum learning visits. For example, a kindergarten class from the Environmental Charter School came to work on a design challenge: make a simple machine that would move a ping pong ball from one place to another without touching it. The kids worked together using wood, peg boards, toilet paper rolls, cardboard, and whatever else they could find in the MAKESHOP to build their contraptions. They had to work together to accomplish their goals.

But it’s not just cardboard and glue. We realize the important role that digital media plays in children’s lives, and we continually work to combine technology with more “real world” materials. MAKESHOP is a partnership project between the Museum, the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out of School Environments (UPCLOSE), and Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). Together, we develop digital experiences that thoughtfully and intentionally consider the child, the family, the content, and the context of use.  The goal is to advance the use of digital media as an integrated tool for facilitating conversation, exploration, and productive making among young families.

We also give the next generation of designers hands-on experience. Each academic semester, a graduate student design team from the ETC works with UPCLOSE and representative MAKESHOP staff to develop a digital component for the space. This collaboration creates new and changing digital media based experiences for visitors, while participating ETC students learn a tremendous amount about meaningful interaction design for young children and families. These graduate students are encouraged to spend time testing their projects by working alongside MAKESHOP staff and families. As the students develop these digital projects, the MAKESHOP facilitation team develops complementary physical and digital making experiences that build on and extend the digital projects.

In response to our work in MAKESHOP, the Museum is now very interested in finding the productive intersections and tensions between the digital and the physical “real stuff” of children’s lives. We have found that children do not make such distinctions. We believe it is our job to help children and their families envision the familiar aspects and objects of their lives differently, to put the digital and physical pieces together in innovative ways. MAKESHOP enables this kind of envisioning and active innovation.

We’ll be hosting a Mini Maker Faire at the Museum on August 18. Last year we had over 1,800 faire-goers come to make, show off their own inventions, and celebrate DIY learning.

Even if you don’t live in Pittsburgh, you can join in by watching an episode of the MAKESHOP Show, an online resource hub for kid makers with a searchable, multimedia treasure trove of projects voted on by kids and designed with a researched understanding of young makers. The resource includes originally produced videos with  how-tos, maker interviews, junk-creation challenges, and more.

For more, watch the video below and follow our blog at www.makeshoppgh.org. We look forward to seeing you in MAKESHOP at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.

Named one of the nation’s ten top children’s museums by Parents magazine in 2011, Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh welcomes more than 250,000 visitors each year. In October 2011 the museum opened MAKESHOP — an exhibit space where kids and adults can access real tools, the latest digital media, and physical materials to tinker and create the inventions of their dreams. We sat down with the museum’s executive director Jane Werner to discuss the museum’s role in the future of learning.

Remake Learning: Why are you hosting an event/conference to talk about museums in the 21st century? Why now?

Jane Werner: We’re at an important moment in time. There’s a lot happening in society, and children’s museums are interested in being at the forefront of thinking about education and children’s learning.

Our design teams are presenting May 2nd after spending a year investigating that question. We have some ideas about where they’re headed. And remarkably, none of it has anything to do with structure, or the building itself or architecture. It’s more about interesting ideas on sustainability, about how to actually teach children about place, about spaces within the city, and how children’s museums can become more centers of innovation in the city.

One designer, for example, is specifically interested in play. He’s asked: why do we have to have these spaces specifically for play? What does this mean about what has happened to play in society, and the role of play, and curiosity in learning? Why do we have these institutions [children’s museums] at all? Play should be everywhere.

We’re always fascinated by pushing the envelope a little bit. We see museums as labs. You can’t flunk at a museum.

Remake Learning: I’m interested in the idea of play. How do we reawaken its importance in our culture?

Jane Werner/ Photo: Ben Filio

JW: I actually don’t use the word “play” that often except when talking with other early childhood professionals. I find that play is off-putting when you are talking to powerbrokers. They easily discount it because “it’s just play” and “we all know how to play.” Instead I usually talk about “curiosity” and “creativity,” and “collaboration” — the outcomes instead of the actions, which I think is the right thing to talk about. All government officials and employers now want creative individuals. And we all know that comes from play.

Remake Learning: Many of the events and activities at the museum seem more like crafts or arts programming. Where is the “museum” in all of this?

JW: You know, the old joke is that children’s museums have stuffed children in them. We are the only museum defined by the audience rather than by the discipline. Many children’s museums including the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh went through branding exercises years back, to find out if we should use the word “museum” at all. But the root of the word goes back to the muses who inspired artists, scientists, and musicians. We decided to keep it because we want to inspire the future artists, scientists, and musicians. And we decided to put the word “children” first in our title.

I think craft has gotten a dirty name over the years. Craft is artisanship. There’s something wonderful about learning how to do something that helps you lead a fruitful life. There’s enjoyment in knowing that you can do things. I think this idea of craftsmanship we’ve sort of lost over the years. I’m a big believer that if you provide materials for kids and if you provide them with inspiration and you provide them with mentors, they will be inspired.

I sew, it’s my hobby. My husband always says I can relate everything back to sewing. I relate architecture to sewing. And he’s right.

Remake Learning: It’s the lens through which you see the world?

JW: Yes, exactly. We learn these things as a 10- or 12-year-old and it helps us feel capable. I can understand the world, because I sew. A lot of people can have those little hidden things. What we’d like to do is to help kids find that lens.

Remake Learning: Why are out-of-school spaces so important to 21st-century learning and skill development?

We’ve had centuries now of content, of feeding kids content. Right now any kid can get any information they want on the Internet. The content is really there. The thing that everyone needs help with is context. They need to be able to ask, “OK, what do I need for this learning?” They need to be able to sit and figure out the problem. Children’s museums are especially good at creating context.

We’re really interested in mentoring. You hear a lot about the “sage on the stage” vs. the “guide by the side.” We’re interested in this guide by the side. We’ve pulled back on creating exhibits that are content focused. Instead we’re investing in talent, and we’re much more interested in the reactions that people have. It makes for a richer learning experience. We’ve hired talented people. We have people who can help visitors figure out what they want to do and how to do it. We’re fortunate in the fact that we can think that way and experiment. It’s the most exciting thing we’ve seen in museums since the eighties. The conversations are incredibly rich.

Remake Learning: Will museums and formal education ever converge fully?

MAKESHOP/ Photo: Ben Folio

JW: Museums can work on the edges. We can say, “look at the learning that’s happening here. Look at these spaces.” We can be an example for schools to look toward and then maybe schools can figure it out.

We have a Ph.D. student working as director of learning and research and she’s looking at what kind of learning is going on in the MAKESHOP, for example. Until we have that proof, I don’t think schools are going to embrace it. And I understand why—they’ve got kids to educate and the way the system is still set up, it’s all based on measurement and test scores.

I hope informal spaces just keep pushing forward so they are always on the edges. Once formal takes over the informal methodologies, there won’t be an edge. And we need the edge for innovation.

Remake Learning: How does the museum’s programming loop back into classrooms?

JW: We have two Pittsburgh Public School Head Start classes in the museum itself. One day I walked into a classroom and I saw handmade paper mobiles hanging up, from work the students had done in MAKESHOP. We’ve started to creep into the classroom. We see our influence on the teachers. It takes time to get used to each other, to working together and to get used to each other’s issues. More partnerships can help both informal and formal education.

We’ve been doing more professional development, more with teachers and preservice teachers, to help inspire teachers before they get into the classroom. To get them to experience different kinds of spaces, to think about how they can set up their classroom differently, to be a little subversive. We’re interested in giving teachers and preservice teachers confidence with the materials, so that they know that they can do it and use them in their classroom.

Remake Learning: What do 3D printers mean for children’s museums?

JW: We have one in the MAKESHOP. We’re experimenting with it right now. I think 3D printing is going to have a huge effect on people, so even just demonstrating it is really good.

Truly I am not the scientist in this. I leave it to the folks in MAKESHOP. They are fooling around and sussing out the possibilities. 3D printers are good for introducing kids to this new technology. It inspires them to think, “I wonder how I can use this.” It allows kids to imagine the technology as part of their future.

Remake Learning: What’s happening in the MAKESHOP that’s unique? What about the space is different than what families are experiencing in other spaces in their lives?

JW: In the MAKESHOP people are working on their own projects side by side whether they are 8 or 50. They are also experimenting with technology in a very hands-on way. What is really interesting is the conversations that happen between the adults and the child. Both are trying to figure out what’s going on, and they have this really great conversation back and forth.

Remake Learning: How important is hands-on/experiential learning to children’s development?

JW: For a while there I was seeing 5-year-olds come in to the museum who’d never used a scissors, because they’d never been given one at home. And I’ve also found that parents don’t want the mess.  But hands-on exploration of materials is so important to understanding the world and your place in it and the fact that you can control parts of your world. You learn your social aspects from that. You learn communication. You learn all the important parts of growing up healthy and becoming a healthy individual. It’s so important to provide these opportunities and children’s museums can do that. We can inspire parents to say “yeah, I can do this at home.” And to see “look, I’m having a good time doing it with them.” And that “It’s also really fun to be out in the world with my kids.”

Remake Learning: What does Pittsburgh have that other cities don’t that makes your programming come together?

JW: I’m not from here originally. But I’ve grown to love Pittsburgh. It has this amazing work ethic and this amazing notion of “let’s just get it done and just go for it and try something.” It’s a spirit of innovation.

The other amazing thing about it is we tend not to get territorial. There’s so much work to be done, we all realize it, and we all work together. I moved to Pittsburgh in the 80s when there were no jobs in Pittsburgh, and all the young people were leaving. It was bad. The downtown was falling apart. The steel mills were closing. Now we have rivers we can kayak on, young people are moving here. I’ve lived in New York City and Philadelphia, and I’ve always said Pittsburgh is a small city with big city amenities. I’ve never been so hopeful for Pittsburgh as I am now.

The SMALLab system bridges the digital and physical worlds in an interesting way.  The SMALLab system itself consists of an overhead projector that throws a virtual world (a game space) onto the floor of a room.  There is a ring of twelve motion capture cameras that outline the room.  The students interact with the system using specially designed wands that have infrared reflective balls that are picked up by the motion capture cameras.  A standard desktop computer crunches the numbers and special software figures out where each wand is in actual 3D space.  The system can pick up not only where each wand is on the x, y, and z axis of the room, but also what the tilt and rotation of each wand is.  The floor in the SMALLab is covered by a white mat and students take off their shoes when they enter the room.  The mat is there for two reasons; the first is to protect the students from the floor should someone trip or get knocked over, and the second is to give the projector a white surface to project onto.  The video above shows students interacting with the system

There are a number of unique things about the SMALLab.  The first is that it allows for kinesthetic learning.  While participating in a SMALLab experience the students are physically engaging with the material to be learned.  Besides being a ton of fun, there is research that shows that kinesthetic learning improves recall of the material to be learned.  The SMALLab is multimodal, which means that the information is coming to the students through multiple channels.  There is the visual channel of the virtual world on the floor, and there is the auditory channel of the sounds coming out of the speakers.  But one of the most important channels is the social channel, the interactions the students are having with one another.  All of this together is called embodied learning.

Designing for the SMALLab poses some interesting design challenges.  For example, while in the SMALLab the roll of the teacher changes from sage-on-the-stage to more of a facilitator / enabler.  Because of the nature of the system the teacher is less of a focus than they usually are in the classroom.  This isn’t to say that the SMALLab replaces the teacher or takes on the responsibility of instructing the students.  The SMALLab is a tool and a skilled teacher is still needed to make it effective at instructing students.  When designing games for the system you have to consider how the teacher is going to utilize the system and what the main interactions are.  Another major consideration is what all of the students that are not holding a wand will be doing.  Between one and three students will be using a wand at a time, so most often most of the students will not be actually manipulating the system.  You have to come up with ways to include everyone in the experience.

The goal of our workshop was to take the attendees through the design process we used when designing our SMALLab experiences.  After a short presentation and Q&A session (link to the PowerPoint here) we broke the attendees up into five groups of four people.  Each group was tasked with coming up with an educational experience utilizing the SMALL system and by the end of the workshop they were to have a simple game design document outlining their game.  We supplied the attendees with a handout (link to handout) that had number of learning objectives that they could choose from and also gave them the option of coming up with their own set of learning objectives.  The handout explains four different advocate roles and the attendees were asked to play them while brainstorming.  The four advocate roles were that of the teacher, that of the non-wand holding students, that of the learning objectives, and that of fun.

We had originally planned on having the teams post their designs on the wall and then walk around and have a poster-style discussion about each design.  We had a bit of a late start and so instead had each team posted their design on the board and gave a short pitch.  The teams presented their learning objectives, the main interactions, what the non-wand holding students would be doing at each step, and what the teacher would be doing during the experience.  We went over time by almost 15 minutes but everyone stuck around to hear about all of the designs.

All the groups had interesting and unique idea of how to achieve their learning goals.  One group decided to teach about mixing color.  An outlined image would appear in the center of the mat.  The students would pick up buckets and fill them with a primary color, then pour and mix the color on a paint mixing board.  Once the paint was mixed the student would grab a paintbrush and paint in a picture in the center of the mat.  Another team’s idea was to teach earth science by having the students play as Greek gods to affect the environment.  They would be able to toss thunderbolts as Zeus or control the water as Poseidon, all the while being supervised by their teacher who would control the experience as Athena.  How cool is that!

The workshop attendees seemed to enjoy the design exercise   I was surprised at the level of engagement at 8 am on a Tuesday morning after a very full Monday.  All of the ideas that the teams came up with were fund and original.  A few of the teams were scrambling to get their game design documents finished in time to show them to the rest of the group, but everyone got it done and the pitches were fantastic.

I had a blast presenting our work and facilitating the workshop.  I’m thankful to all of the attendees and to the Sandbox folks for having us.  I look forward Sandbox Summit 2014!

It’s a buzzword for sure. But media scholar Henry Jenkins has defined it as storytelling across multiple forms of media, “with each platform making a unique and original contribution to the experience as a whole,” he writes in a recent blog post. Kids can interact with their favorite Sesame Street characters in the TV series, books, and online games, for example. Jenkins argues that a good transmedia narrative uses these different media to “flesh out the world, to extend the time line, to deepen our familiarity with the characters, and to increase our engagement.” He says this encourages a new kind of learning.

With an educational property like Sesame Street, transmedia does something else – it reinforces the learning both by encouraging us to reread and re-experience a particularly pleasurable narrative (something, as we all know, kids are often inclined to do with little or no adult encouragement) and because they are invited to connect together pieces of information across multiple installments. In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell (2000) describes the original Sesame Street as “sticky,” suggesting that young people become so drawn to its vivid characters that they keep coming back for more and in the process, these repeated encounters reinforce what they learn from its curricular design.

Last month, researchers at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab and and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released T is for Transmedia: Learning through Transmedia Play, a guidebook to understanding the role of transmedia in the lives of elementary school children. The report helps to identify the relationship between transmedia and storytelling, play, and learning, and provides case studies of meaningful transmedia play experiences as examples.

“We really have two goals for the report,” said co-author Rebecca Herr-Stephenson. “Our first is to get educators thinking about how they might incorporate transmedia play into activities, lesson plans, or projects. Our second goal is to put the design recommendations before media makers in the hopes that the principles will reinforce the good work people are already doing as well as encourage others to bring play and learning to the forefront of their transmedia projects.”

The authors, including Herr-Stephenson and her fellow researcher Meryl Alper, say that transmedia experiences, such as following the digital novel “Inanimate Alice,” are integral because they help students dig deeply into narratives that interest them, and encourage media engagement as well as visual and oral literacy.

“All of these are ways for kids to participate in and create culture,” Erin Reilly, Creative Director of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, said in a short video produced by the lab. “They don’t see a separation between online or offline. They see that technology—this medium right here—is a representation of how they can actually share their voice in the culture.”

Helping participate in new media culture as creators is just one of the many capabilities of transmedia, especially when the concept is woven into a diverse curriculum. Game designers and developers have a special opportunity to produce more “transformative” games that often help encourage personal growth and development.

Along with others in our region, Schell Games has been championing the production of transformative games and recently took their commitment to the next level. They’ve joined the Fred Rogers Company and PBS to create the interactive website Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, the online supplement to the new animated series based on the legacy of Fred Rogers.

The new online Neighborhood includes free, interactive games for kids featuring the “next generation” of the beloved characters from the original Mister Rogers television program. The cast of characters, led by a young Daniel Tiger, use imagination, creativity, and music to explore social-emotional themes. The show and the interactive games on its website, mobile, and tablets are designed to teach key social skills to preschoolers ages 2 to 4.

The concept may seem simple, but the implementation of transmedia is crucial for today’s students to develop along with a comprehensive understanding of 21st-century tools. More importantly, it helps erase the boundaries between learning and play in the most exciting ways—by engaging children in interactive media they love and can learn from.

As the nation moves toward Common Core standards in classrooms, school districts are bracing for a sudden drop in test scores. The Common Core standards, which 46 states and the District of Columbia have adopted, are asking different things of students (and teachers). Eventually, supporters hope, the new standards will create true 21st-century learners who can master not only the facts but the ability to be a critical thinker, innovator, and lifelong learner. In the meantime, however, the big question mark is their immediate and longer term impact, particularly on low-income children or those for whom English is not their first language.

The standards are in essence asking kids to understand not how to measure but what to measure, not just how to read but how to think.

In math, for example, students will gain a deep understanding of how math works and  be able to explain it. In English Language Arts, as Susan Edelman writes in the New York Post, “students learn about the world — and build vocabulary — by reading more non-fiction, including biographies, historical stories, and articles.”

Robert Rothman, writing at the Harvard Education Publishing Group blog, stressed the ability to argue from evidence and evaluate the arguments of others, particularly in writing. Wilson Mizner, who said, “I respect the faith, but doubt is what gives you an education,” would be proud.

The Common Core standards focus on reading, math, and writing, but the National Academy of Sciences just released a companion set of standards in its Next Generation Science Standards.

The standards are designed to build on key concepts over a student’s career and stress the interrelationship between and across key concepts in science. Students will also need to understand the “how” of science—doing experiments, practicing methods of scientific inquiry, learning to be smart consumers of research and science.

In short, students will have to learn to think independently and solve problems. And this is where a city’s museums, libraries, and other learning opportunities come into play.

The world has always been a big game board for those who love learning. As kids, our learning and growing didn’t start and stop in the classroom. Indeed, for many kids who hated school, learning happened everywhere but in school. A young 20-something who is now a full-time car mechanic told me that he couldn’t wait to get out of school so he could head out to the garage where his dad was restoring vintage cars. He had to learn to convert measurements from metric systems for the European car parts, and he learned the meaning of viscosity when repairing engines. He honed his reading skills poring over manuals. That garage was his classroom.

Likewise for kids who find a robotics class after school like those at the Carnegie Science Center, or who learn about the science of color and light as they do at the Andy Warhol Museum, or who jump in surprise when the circuit they have created from a paper clip and play-dough lights a light bulb at a Makerspace, the joy of learning is transparent. And that joy can, with smart guidance, help transform kids into deeper thinkers.

As Dennis M. Bartels, executive director of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, wrote in a recent issue of Scientific American on the ability to teach critical thinking, or its cornerstone, the ability to ask questions,

“Museums and other institutions of informal learning may be better suited to teach this skill than elementary and secondary schools. …The Maker Faire, which conducts techie do-it-yourself projects, has reintroduced the idea that our learning is richer for our mistakes: D.I.Y. experimentalists get stuck, reframe the question and figure things out.”

He also noted that informal learning environments tolerate failure better than schools, which, when guided by mentors, is a great way to learn.

Afterschool spaces, like those at The Labs at the Carnegie Mellon Library can also widen kids’ horizons, allowing them to find and develop their interests, and to see the almost limitless possibilities before them—particularly for low-income children whose scope is too often limited. Afterschool programs also add key instructional time to a day—up to three hours, or another half-day of learning.

The hands-on, interest-based learning, individualized to a child’s burgeoning interests, can complement what transpires in the classroom. Kids become critical thinkers when they begin to understand the connections between ideas and execution, cause and effect, scientific principles and real-world results, all through hands-on experimentation.

In many ways, afterschool programs can be petri dishes of experimentation. As mentor Al Walus in Michigan City, Indiana, sees it, afterschool spaces are where schools and communities can tinker with curriculum innovation that can then bleed back into the daily classroom. In Michigan City, Purdue University joined with Safe Harbor afterschool programs where Walus was volunteering to get kids excited about STEM via robotics and engineering.

The program, part of the 21^st Century Community Learning Centers, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, caught the attention of the school superintendent, who has since instituted changes to the middle-school curriculum. The superintendent views afterschool as a “curricular extension” of the academic day—“a safe space where student can take risks, ask questions, try new things, and apply what they’ve learned,” according to a 2011 annual report of the Mott Foundation, which funds many afterschool initiatives.

For kids in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York, these opportunities to learn more deeply are being deliberately stitched together by Hive Learning Networks. Members of the network include youth-serving cultural organizations such as museums and libraries, and afterschool programs of all stripes, as well as higher education offerings and more.

But rather than stand-alone programming that kids must seek out and find on their own, the Hive is coordinating its offerings, joining with other institutions so kids and families can have a seamless path through learning. Families shouldn’t have to do the knitting together themselves, Hive organizers argue. In the Hive world, it is the community’s responsibility to make those pathways as integrated as possible.

Key to their success are mentors, who guide youth as they discover new passions, and most important, connect that newfound interest back to the classroom.

With continued support, our nation’s schools and afterschool programs can engage young people in deeper learning. We have to do something. As Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum write in “That Used to be Us,” “average is over.”

Senqué earned his place at the White House Science Fair as a result of his project Brain Quest: Cell Tracing with CFSE, a research project to investigate how to cause anti-virus cells to successfully proliferate within the brain, which could cure diseases such as rabies, Alzheimer’s, sclerosis and several forms of cancer.

For the past four consecutive years, Senqué has presented his research at the Pennsylvania Regional Science and Engineering Fair (PRSEF), with topics ranging from toxicology in local water systems to cell growth patterns in the brain. At the Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Science (PJAS) Region 7 Science Fair, Senqué has earned 1^st place awards for four consecutive years. His impressive work has earned Senqué sponsorship awards from the United States Navy and UPMC Center for Inclusion.

Alongside Zainab Oni from MOUSE Corps in New York City, Senqué represented the Hive Learning Networks at the White House Science Fair. As the third city to establish a Hive Learning Network, Pittsburgh is  creating new opportunities for teens to explore their interests, create  their own spaces, experiences, and projects, and share what they make  with their peers.

As noted on Hive New York’s blog, the White House Science Fair follows on the President’s Educate to Innovate Campaign.

To help support , President Obama helped kick off this summer’s Maker Party campaign! From the official White House press release announcing new commitments to advance the President’s Educate to Innovate Campaign:

Mozilla and the National Writing Project will lead Maker Party 2013: Learn, Connect, Share, a summer long campaign where teachers, technologists and families across the country will join dozens of partner organizations including the NYC Department of Education, Intel, and DIY.org to help young people embrace the maker spirit and learn career building STEM skills. The campaign will launch on June 15 with a Hive Learning Pop-up, the first of over 1,000 summer learning events planned as part of the Summer of Making and Connecting supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

Go to www.webmaker.org/party to find out more, sign up to hold an event, become a partner, or just join the party!

And if that wasn’t enough, summer excitement, Hive  Pittsburgh will kick of its summer programming in less than two weeks at the Andy Warhol Museum’s Youth Invasion on Friday, May 3rd. As the launch event for Hive Days of Summer, Youth Invasion is the first event in a three month  campaign to help teens to reinvent summer learning by invading museums,  taking over parks, remixing the web, turning libraries inside out,  making their own spaces, and energizing life in their communities.

We’re thrilled to see Senqué recognized for his impressive work. His success illustrates the boundless potential our youth have when they are  supported to pursue their passions and we can’t wait to see what comes next.

Andy Clayman gave the keynote address.  Andy is the creative director of Avenues, The World School, an amazing K-12 school that recently opened in New York City.  The school does a number of unique things such as teaching multiple subjects around a central topic and instructing in multiple languages over the course of a single day.  Check out their YouTube channel, the videos are beautiful.  I think this is a great model for schools, unfortunately the price is way above what most families will ever be able to afford.

Margaret Robertson is the managing director of Hide and Seek and she gave a talk titled “New Games / Old Rules: How we play today.”  She spoke about a few of her games including The Show Must Go On, a game for kids about assembling an opera, and Tate Trumps, a game that challenges kids to go into museums and find the painting that, if all the paintings came to life, would win in a fight.  Margaret has such a wonderful attitude and approach to game design.  Hide & Seek just had their Tiny Games Kickstarted, I wish I had caught this a few days earlier.

Katie Bisbee gave a surprise talk about Donors Choose, a website where teachers post classroom project requests.  Donors can choose to fund specific projects and when a project reaches its funding goal the organization ships the materials to the school.  Each and every Sandbox attendee was given a $50 card to use on the site to fund a project.  This website is such a fantastic idea and has been doing this amazing work for quite some time collective action toolkit, I’m a little ashamed that I had never heard of it.  I’m looking forward to choosing a project to donate to, I’m going to hunt for a teacher that is doing a cool game-based project.

Monday afternoon I attended a presentation by David Sherwin of Frog Design called “Timeboxing: Better ideas faster.”  This was essentially a workshop about agile development and methods to get the most out of your creative time.  Timeboxing is working in short sprints that each has a distant purpose and goal, and then taking a step back to reevaluate and redirect.  The verbs he used are act, evaluate, and articulate, allowing you to work iteratively.  A theme of David’s earlier talk was that design is a form of directed problem solving (check out the Collective Action Toolkit), and the workshop was an exploration of this idea.

Fred Newman gave a fun talk about growing up in Georgia and falling in love with sound.  He performed a number of songs, don’t miss him performing the nutcracker suite with his mouth!  Fred creates the voices for Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion which my stepfather assures me is quite excellent, I’ve never had the pleasure of listening.

Sandbox Day 2

On Tuesday morning I ran a workshop with my Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center teammate Anisha Deshmane and CMU ETC director Drew Davidson.  We gave a short presentation about the work we did designing educational experiences for the SMALLab system at the Elizabeth Forward School District in the fall of last year, then took the workshop attendees through a design exercise.  I’ll be posting a write up about the workshop shortly.

The first talk on Tuesday morning was by the founders of JibJab and, more recently, Storybots.  Evan and Gregg Spiridellis told the highly entertaining story of how JibJab came to be, and also showed of some of the new content and applications that are being made for their new kid-centric brand StoryBots.  On the Storybots website kids can make books that star themselves similar to the way that you can create customized eCards on JibJab.  Check out the website to see a set of animated ABC videos that are fantastic, Evan’s favorite is the hilarious video for the letter “X”.

Mathias Crawford gave a presentation titled “After the Sandbox:  Everything you didn’t learn in kindergarten.”  The thrust of his presentation seemed to be that people aren’t engaging in collaborative work and play as well or in the way that they think they are.  He talked about people creating projects together in Minecraft as not real collaboration and as more of parallel play.  He said that the most people don’t actually think about what other players are doing in collaborative Minecraft projects until they get in their way, and that most collaborative Minecraft projects show more individual creativity based on self-direction.  He thinks that true collaborative creativity needs to look more like bebop jazz, where your creativity is rooted in the actions of the people around you.  He uses the Schulberg Playground in Wiesbaden, Germany as an example of play where the movements of one person on the ropes affects every other person on the rope playground.  I wonder what he thinks about tabletop roll playing games such as D&D!

The closing keynote was by Dale Dougherty, the president and CEO of Maker Media.  He gave a heartwarming talk peppered with examples of people reaching out into the community by making things and sharing that experience with others.  I’m a huge fan of Make Magazine and hearing Dale talk made me want to run home and start a new build project.  He spoke about making as empowerment, as a way to realize that you can really do something.  I really hope that schools embrace the maker culture that bass been springing up around the country.  It is sad to think that kids get so excited about making things, then go to school and have their creativity stifled.  The Makerspace playbook is intended to help you start a Makerspace in your school or community, it is free at http://makerspace.com/maker-news/makerspace-playbook.

The 2013 Sandbox Summit was full of interesting conversations, positive people, and also a few tears.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Boston and to all people affected by violence around the world, peace be with you.

Now go make things!

“Today, women hold a disproportionately small share of the degrees in majors that strongly correlate to post-college STEM jobs such as math and engineering,” said Chelsea Clinton in a recent article for the Huffington Post. “It’s not only women who have lost out because of these disparities. Overall economic growth has suffered too,” she continued, citing a Booz & Company study that found that America’s gross domestic product would rise by 5 percent if women matched men’s employment rates. “With the U.S. Department of Commerce expecting STEM jobs to grow 17 percent between 2008 [and] 2018 … excluding women from the pipeline hurts American companies in search of the best high-tech talent,” she said. “Economic expansion hinges on both halves of the workforce receiving the tools needed to drive innovation.”

Many have echoed this sentiment, including Chairman of Shell UK Edward Daniels, who penned a recent op-ed for the London Evening Standard. “The chronic shortage of girls going into science and engineering is not simply a question of gender equality. It is a huge threat to economic growth. We are losing out on untapped talent and failing to keep pace with our competitors,” said Daniels, who stated that roughly 90 percent of girls “effectively disqualify themselves” from a career in engineering by the age of 14.

Daniels suggested that female role models in STEM fields need to be more visible if we are ever going to break the “just for boys” stereotype that surrounds potential career paths in math and science—something that the women behind the Girls of Steel robotics team in Pittsburgh have been working on.

The team, started in 2011 by Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics industry program director Patti Rote, aims to “give girls the skills that will last far beyond their high-school years,” according to their mission statement, and has been a huge success. As reporter Dave Zuchowski noted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in their first year the team took home Rookie All Star awards at the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science Technology (FIRST) regional competitions in both Pittsburgh and Washington, DC. Their winning streak continued in 2012 when they won the Engineering Inspiration Award. Last month, they won the Dean’s List Finalist Award and again won the Engineering Inspiration Award, which qualifies them for the world championship April 25-27 in St. Louis.

FIRST is another organization working to create opportunities for young people in STEM fields, with a vision of creating a world “where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders.” The nonprofit has been staging youth robotics championships for over 20 years.

The vision of FIRST is unfortunately not yet a reality, but the work of programs like Girls of Steel is helping to make it become one. Groups like Click! Spy School, which introduces young girls to science concepts through “covert missions” where they are secret agents-in-training, and the career exploration program CanTEEN, also in Pittsburgh, are doing incredible work engaging young women in STEM subjects like never before and helping them envision future careers. Both are programs of the Carnegie Science Center’s Chevron Center for STEM Education and Career Development.

“We need to work with teachers to ensure classroom science offers girls a vision that matches their personal values by showing that it is the engineer, the physicist, who can make major contributions to solving global challenges,” said Daniels, and it is the innovative educators in Pittsburgh and elsewhere who are spearheading this movement, exemplifying the goals Daniels and other field experts have been echoing for far too long.

Writing in the Seattle Times, Maeda, now president of the Rhode Island School of Design, says he doesn’t want the students of the future to have to rely blindly on software created by someone else. He argues we should treat the computer as a new kind of artistic material and learning to code as a key literacy.

I remain convinced that artists and designers will be the innovators of this century, and that the problem-solving, the fearlessness and the critical thinking and making skills that I see every day are what is needed to keep our country competitive.

Maeda was the keynote speaker last week at the Arts Education Partnership National Forum in Washington, where several members of the Hive Learning Networks were in attendance.

We came to the forum to share our experiences of how kids today are learning with art and technology, and how parents, educators, and advocates can to work together to support that learning through mentoring and collaboration.

But we also came to listen. The Arts Education Partnership has been one of the most important national groups speaking up about why arts education is crucial for today’s students, even and especially in light of new technologies.

The twice-yearly forum brings leaders together to talk about arts education and to advance best practices.  In addition to Maeda there were folks talking about how schools across the country are nurturing creativity through new models and public-private partnerships that ensure equity and access for all students.

About forty people attended a session on developing place-based networks to enhance collaboration between artists, educators, and others.The session included a panel discussion with representatives of the Hive Learning Networks in New York City and Pittsburgh. Chris Lawrence, Senior Director of the Mozilla Mentor Community and director of Hive New York, commented on the contributions arts educators have already made to the debate.

“Arts educators have been at the forefront of rethinking qualifications through things like portfolios,” said Lawrence, “And that’s strongly related to the work we and others are doing to develop Open Badges as an alternative way of recognizing achievement.”

We also learned about work going on in Portland, OR, where voters passed a local public fund to make targeted investments in K-12 arts education and community arts organizations. The $35 tax is placing teachers in every local elementary school and funding city arts programs.

We heard about the recent partnership between Performing Arts Workshop and Global Writes, for example, to integrate technology and the performing arts to promote literacy and collaboration.

And we learned that the AEP has just released ArtsEdSearch.org – the nation’s first online clearinghouse of research and policy information focused entirely on the educational outcomes associated with arts learning.

The conference emphasized a point that should be obvious to everyone but sadly isn’t: arts education is essential. Research shows that arts education is good at building the kinds of skills kids are going to need in future workplaces like critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, innovation, communication, and collaboration. It also helps build the skills they’ll need as citizens in our increasingly global world like empathy and cross-cultural understanding.

In Pittsburgh, we’ve just joined New York and Chicago as the third Hive Learning Network. These networks reimagine how learning is organized and supported across youth-serving organizations.  The networks aim to create learning opportunities that connect all the spaces where learning takes place in kids’ lives­—at home, with peers, and at school. We see nurturing creativity and learning in the arts as a key part of this work, supporting our students’ creative selves both in school and out.

Photo/ Steven Depolo

As New York Times reporter Alan Feuer noted in “The Mayor’s Geek Squad,” cities are getting in on the game big time. New York City, for example, is using big data to make city services more efficient and transparent and to find new ways to serve residents by tracing the daily data breadcrumbs we leave behind as we eat, complain, drive, walk, turn down the thermostat, throw out the garbage, park the car, swipe our transit cards, or any of the other mindless, quotidian acts.

With the data they can track commuting habits to find bottlenecks and other issues. They can monitor parking tickets to figure out traffic flow. They can identify dangerous crosswalks (or mid-streets in the case of New Yorkers). They even found restaurants that were dumping grease into the city sewers, causing countless headaches and stopped up sinks.

“I think of us as the Get Stuff Done Folks,” the leader of the team told the Times. “All we do is take and process massive amounts of information and use it to do things more effectively.”

As cities get into the act, one wonders, what could “big data” do for education?

Quite a bit apparently—and several companies are launching several new tools. Richard Nieva reports at Online.Edu on one such tool, Desire2Learn, which he reports, has raised $80 million in funding. The tool does two things. It helps a student pick classes that he or she is likely to succeed in, and thus avoiding wasting time and money (in college at least) of taking a course you’re bound to flunk.

As Nieva writes:

It will, for instance, tell a liberal arts type how he will likely fare in an engineering class by scouring his past classwork (or high school transcripts if he’s a freshman) and compare his academic record to other students who have taken that class. Baker claims it can predict if a student will pass or not with 90 percent accuracy and even settle on his letter grade with 92 percent accuracy.

At lower grade levels, it gathers data on how a student is actually doing in a class “and spots red flags like a bad grade on a quiz, or, more subtly, rushing through an online assignment.”

The New York City public school system, the University of Arizona, the University of Memphis, and the Harvard School of Business have all signed on, according to Nieva.

Other tools help teachers tailor lessons to individual students. As student progress through lessons, the computer program sends information to the teacher about each student so he or she can customize the lesson to that individual learner. Without such instant insights, it “would be impossible to modify an in-person lecture to account for every individual student’s needs, but technology can help deliver a customized level of education.”

One tool, “CourseSmart,” writes David Streitfeld:

goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning.

The program lets teachers know when “students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all.” Streitfeld says, “Engagement information could give the colleges early warning about which students might flunk out, while more broadly letting teachers know if the whole class is falling behind.” But the teacher, or the department, or the school as a whole is not the end of the information chain: “Eventually, the data will flow back to the publishers, to help prepare new editions.”

Here in Pittsburgh, Vincent Aleven and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University are developing Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Darrell West, writing at the Brookings Institution, thinks that these tools can help instructors see the process of learning unfold for students.

These types of computer tutorials can evaluate problem-solving approaches and provide feedback along the instructional path. The system sends error messages if the student follows an incorrect approach and provides answer hints if requested by the student. Instructors can get a detailed analysis not just of whether the student reached the final answer correctly, but how they solved the problem.

And beyond the classroom, big data could help parents and others identify failing schools. Chicago School Select, for example, a recent winner of a Knight Foundation contest for improving how citizens and government interact, is a personalized decision tool for parents choosing from the myriad of public schools. This web application allows parents to check off what they want in a school and then rank and compare schools on the basis of those attributes.

But not all are so enamored. The collected mass of data on individual learners could follow them – and in some cases haunt them—for life.  And data is inherently biased, despite claims otherwise. Data without design is just numbers after all, and humans are the ones still designing the data analysis tools. And as we know from centuries of science, human bias inevitably creeps into any design. Similarly, as Microsoft Research’s Kate Crawford writes at the Harvard Business Review blog, “Data are assumed to accurately reflect the social world, but there are significant gaps, with little or no signal coming from particular communities.”

No doubt more and better approaches to using big data are on the horizon as the younger generation takes the reins.

“Young people, because of social media, have always felt they’ve had a voice,” said Jennifer Pahlka, the executive director of Code for America, a volunteer group of techies that helps city governments write code for public projects.

“They’re coming from the assumption that government is a hackable system — an operating system that can be optimized. It’s in their DNA, and they just go and do it.”

It’s National Robotics Week and a good time to ponder what this may mean for our future and the future world our children will inhabit. It’s a good time to pay attention to leaders like Nourbakhsh, who understand the power this new technology will hold in the future and say we should be asking today how we’re going to share our world with these “new creatures.”

Nourbakhsh leads the robotics Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. For those of us not in the field, his predictions about where robotics technology may take us read like a sci-fi novel – nanobots that could allow us to assume different physical forms, adbots with interactive custom advertisements, the internet that takes a physical form. It’s almost mind blowing to imagine.

But what shape this technology actually will take, he seems to be saying, is up to today’s citizens and students to decide. And educators should be taking note.

As the leader of Carnegie Mellon’s Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment Lab (CREATE Lab), Nourbakhsh is at the helm of helping to prepare teachers and students to use technology in socially meaningful ways. As regular readers of Remake Learning know, the folks at CREATE Lab are responsible for some incredible learning opportunities for kids outside of school and partnerships with classroom teachers designed to, according to their website, “empower a technologically fluent generation.”

Their Arts & Bots program, for example, teaches educators to experiment with robotics in their classrooms. Teachers in social studies, chemistry, and language arts classes are integrating CREATE’s Hummingbird Kits into their classrooms. Kids are building robots out of craft materials and animating them using a visual, drag and drop, programming environment.

At The Ellis School for example, high school science teacher Terry Richards used the kit to have her students create robotic arm models to study anatomy. See Barbara’s story on Robotics poetry for more great examples.

National Robotics Week is an educational event that aims to inspire students to pursue careers in robotics and related science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Congress established National Robotics Week in 2010 to raise awareness about robots and their important role in shaping the future of education, industry, and the U.S. economy. You can check out the website for more information, including a map showing events in your area (looks like there are events in almost every state), as well as recommended activities and online resources.

To help celebrate here in Pittsburgh, CMU’s Robotics Institute is hosting some special lectures, project demonstrations, and the annual Mobot (mobile robot) races. And the Carnegie Science Center’s incredible Roboworld exhibit is holding behind-the-scenes tours. You can see robots that shoot baskets and play air hockey and interact via touchscreen, as well as some of the most famous robots of them all—think C-3PO and R2-D2 from “Star Wars,” HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and Robby from “Forbidden Planet.”

The National Robotics Week Advisory Council is also debuting videos in a push to inspire the future innovators about STEM subjects. A NASA video featuring Bobak Ferdowsi, NASA’s ”Mohawk Guy” and flight director for Mars rover Curiosity, is a reminder of the great power and promise of these technologies. No matter what their chosen field, roboticists say it’s likely today’s students may be working shoulder-to-shoulder with robots in the future.  It’s a reminder of why tomorrow’s leaders need to be technologically fluent and why they need to understand the important ethical implications as well.

“We have invented a new species, part material and part digital,” Nourbakhsh said in a recent op-ed, “that eventually will have superhuman qualities in both worlds at once.”

He predicts some of the ways robotics could strengthen the power of corporations, and further concentrate power in the hands of the few. But he also argues that the robotic future we should try to bring about is one that uses robotics to bring civic and community change, and to empower individuals and communities to make sure technology is used for the public good.

“My hope is that this book will help us envision, discuss and prepare for change, so that people and communities can influence how the robot future unfolds,” Nourbakhsh said.

National Robotics Week’s focus on STEM education is one way to do that. We’ll have more on how educators are using robotics to inspire our future innovators next week.

But what are the key learning outcomes of a DIY movement? What specific activities, tools, and environments can help realize and enhance the learning potential of making? How can we make it appeal to a broad array of learning styles and integrate it into all kinds of educational institutions?

These are some of the questions a new research initiative aims to tackle this upcoming school year. With support from the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub at the University of California, Irvine and the MacArthur Foundation, researchers at Indiana University will look at the value of making and figure out what further research is needed.  The plan is to encourage collaboration between the maker community, educators, and educational researchers to develop this research agenda.

The group held an introductory Make-to-Learn Symposium before the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Chicago last month, where educators, researchers, and makers gathered to talk about the role of making in educational practice.

Representatives from Iridescent, Global Kids, Mozilla, and the Hive NYC Learning Network talked about using educational digital badges for learning on maker projects; and young makers from Chicago’s YOUmedia spaces shared their experiences on projects like spoken word poetry and game design. And Lisa Brahms and Adam Nye from the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh talked about how maker experiences, particularly in museum maker spaces, can bring families together and promote learning.  They heard from maker guru Dale Dale Dougherty, founder of Make Magazine and creator of the Maker Faire.

And they spent some time on some really cool projects.

The group is hosting a challenge this month on Instructables.com, asking young makers between the ages of 13 and 18 to share a recent project and answer four questions about what they learned in the process.  They say the contest is for everyone “Whether you’re making a pinewood derby car, a short movie, a videogame, a painting, a garden, a sweater, a science fair project, a school assignment.” Young makers will need to document their project in the step-by-step, photo, or video Instructables format. Entries are due by April 15.

Each entry will be judged by a panel of maker educator experts, and are eligible to win a gift card or an iPad mini. Browsing through the entries they’ve got already is inspirational. Check out the Church cake, or medieval dress, or this digital art lesson: how to draw ballerinas using Photoshop CS5 Extended.

And, for grownups, if you’re an educator, advocate, or researcher interested in following the Make-to-Learn movement and connecting around making, learning, and education, you can sign up for this new public listserve. To join send an email to maketolearn-l-subscribe@nullindiana.edu. And we’ll continue to cover their findings here at RemakeLearning.org.

In the United States, this question is gaining attention as school reform sweeps the nation.  To date, the reforms have been largely disappointing or the improvements fleeting, not to mention the evaluations have frequently sported problems that render the results questionable. To a cynical observer, it seems that nothing is working in the classroom.

But if we’ve learned one thing in the intervening years, it’s that not all learning happens in the classroom. And in a vibrant ecosystem of out-of-school learning opportunities like those on the ground in Pittsburgh (many of which are joining the Hive Learning Network), quantifying what happens in out-of-school time and whether, and how, that learning translates back into the classroom, is critical.

The work, however, is seldom easy. One of the most rigorous assessments of an out-of-school program with teens is Barton Hirsch and colleagues’ evaluation of After School Matters in Chicago. After School Matters has great reach and well-implemented program elements, and it targets a high-need group of teens. The program enrolled nearly 7,500 students in 2009, combining interest-driven classes with a paid apprenticeship.

Unfortunately, and despite high hopes, the results were, as education scholar Greg Duncan put it, “sobering.” The program had little effect on academics or job skills. It did, however, have a nominal impact on behavioral problems and self-regulation.

Despite the disappointing results, the findings underscore the importance of looking broadly at possible outcomes or impacts, beyond just “did the program improve test scores?”

Looking at outcomes such as whether programs improve engagement with school, or reduce juvenile delinquency or problem behaviors, or make neighborhoods safer when kids are engaged and not idle, or make teens feel more connected to positive role models, or even whether programs can improve physical health should be in the purview of evaluators.

And, impacts on positive behavior are important to include as well. Too often research and policy concerns itself with the problem behaviors only. All of these factors contribute indirectly, and perhaps directly, to school outcomes in the end.

One positive behavior that has caught researchers’ eye is a program’s influence on helping youth build an identity. Bill Penuel, professor of educational psychology and learning sciences in the School of Education at the University of Colorado, and director of evaluation research for the Center for Technology at SRI International, stressed the importance of this in an email:

“We want to know what consequences there are for who they are becoming. I think we need to think about these kinds of settings as potentially identity transforming sites, sites where people discover new interests, pursuits, images of who they can become. And then we can ask: How do these sites enable that? How do they help young people gain access to other sites where they can grow even more?”

If students begin to see themselves as web designers or photographers or engineers after taking part in out-of-school opportunities, that new identity may indirectly translate back to the classroom via a newfound excitement about math or literature.

An art history major at the University of Pittsburgh, for example, told the Pittsburgh Activation Lab, which is conducting a large-scale survey of how kids become interested in and engaged with art, science and technology, that her participation in the Young Writers’ Institute in Grades 4-6 was pivotal, particularly the visit to the Carnegie Museum of Art. The freedom to choose one piece of art to view over an extended period and to write about her impressions was the one thing that focused her attention on becoming an art major.

Becoming involved in the actual planning and direction of the out-of-school programs can also help youth develop their identities and strengthen involvement. University of Pittsburgh’s Tom Akiva is currently mapping the resources and barriers to youth leadership opportunities in Pittsburgh’s out-of-school programs with the hope that his findings can help improve on and build more of these leadership opportunities. The study is in the field now. Read a recent Q&A with Akiva on civic participation.

Although evaluations can be difficult, and the best cost money, they are critical to sustainability. By better understanding how and where programs leave their impression, program designers can continue to improve the offerings.

Passing laws in Congress is an important part of the American system of government, but it’s a lousy way to introduce young people to civic engagement. For one thing, Congress doesn’t pass a whole lot of laws these days – the 112th Congress, described as the least productive in a half-century, passed 61 bills of 3914 proposed. (Shep Melnick has the best counterargument I’ve read to the idea that the 112th Congress was badly broken, but I remain unpersuaded.) While excellent books like Bob Graham’s America: The Owner’s Manual include stories of young people who’ve had major impacts on legislative processes, for many people, civic engagement is going to unfold far outside the legislative realm.

We tend to teach a version of civics that would have been familiar to 19th century Americans. Aspects of that 19th century model still apply, but we rarely teach the 20th century model of campaigning that governs our electoral processes, or the 21st century forms of participation that may transform governance and engagement. The mismatch between a 19th century understanding and a 21st century reality may help explain widespread distrust and dissatisfaction with government (I’m grateful to Oscar Salazar of CitiVox for the idea of mismatching expectations in American government over the centuries).

Representative democracy rests on the idea that a small number of representatives can meet, face-to-face, and deliberate their way towards solutions, representing the perspectives of their constituents but being open to persuasion through argument and compromise. At the outset of the American experiment, the nation’s founders argued at length about the size of congressional districts, wanting a balance between a number of representatives who could meaningfully debate with one another, and districts small enough to allow representatives to “possess a proper knowledge of the local circumstances of their numerous constituents,” in the words of James Madison in Federalist #55. Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, a long-time advocate for expanding the size of Congress, points out that George Washington’s sole intervention during the constitutional convention was to argue for districts that included 30,000 citizens, not the more massive 40,000 proposed.

Congress hasn’t expanded the total number of districts since 1913, except to add seats for Alaska and Hawaii, and the average representative now speaks for 709,000 people. While it was possible – perhaps even likely – that voters had a personal relationship with their representatives, it’s much less likely now. This, in turn, challenges the logic of representative democracy, raising questions of whether representatives know the opinions of those they represent, and whether those represented trust their representatives.

The shift towards larger districts has been accompanied by a shift towards broadcast democracy, where representatives campaign via newspapers, radio and television, and where broadcast media in turn provides information to representatives about the preferences of their constituents. These broadcast channels amplify a limited number of voices to very large audiences, and with the rise of nationwide cable news networks, they likely have contributed to a shift in which politicians address voters nationally, not just the voters in their communities. Representatives who are out of step with the broader mood of their party are likely to receive criticism from around the nation and will suffer financially when they run for local office, as party money and money from outside donors is likely to be withheld.

In the process, moderates have completely disappeared from the Senate, according to the National Journal, which ranks politicians on ideology based on their voting record and finds that no Republicans are more liberal than any Democrats, or any Democrats more conservative than Republicans. That’s a stark change from a few decades back, when New England Republicans were often more liberal than Southern Democrats. Those liberal Republicans were able to get elected in a state like Massachusetts because many voters found a mix of fiscal pragmatism and compassionate social policy to be an appealing mix. But that mix doesn’t work when audiences are national – Mitt Romney, who was elected governor as a progressive republican was forced to declare himself “severely conservative” when running for the presidency.

The 20th century has seen both the de-regionalization and homogenization of politics and the rise of political specialists who understand how to work the mechanisms of broadcast democracy. Lobbyists have grown powerful offering the vast sums of money necessary to finance television campaigns. Pollsters and media consultants manage the process of determining voter perspectives and communicating messages locally and nationally. While the recent trend in campaigning is towards hyper-targeting, as explored in Sasha Isenberg’s “The Victory Lab,” the technical innovations in identifying and mobilizing the few conservative voters in liberal Cincinnati in the hopes of winning office in Ohio are hardly victories for increased agency – broadcast democracy often treats voters as a mass entity, and targeting treats them as smaller masses, not as independent actors in an ongoing conversation with their representatives to build and shape policy.

With the rise of social media in the 21st century, media has become more personal and less homogenous, leading to concerns that individuals are occupying filter bubbles or echo chambers that make it harder for people to empathize and find common ground with those who hold different opinions. Social media has helped people find micropublics, circles of friends who share an interest or a common history and tend to be highly responsive to each other’s posts, updates and online sharings. People are becoming used to creating “content” of all sorts, and receiving feedback on this content, whether it’s a post about their personal life or their political beliefs.

The U.S. government is slowly adapting to this new reality. We the People is an odd mashup of pre-digital political technology – the petition – with the micropublic, where 100,000 people can join together and demand a response on an issue they are passionate about. In this model, there’s the possibility of creating a community that debates and develops a response to an issue, but that capacity is more latent than realized, as Catherine d’Ignazio reports in her blog post on a White House civic hackathon.

These highlights are excerpted from Ethan Zuckerman’s post at DMLcentral.

The teens worked in groups to create a poster board presenting their ideas for awesome apps. This helped them to develop team work skills as well as experience the planning that goes into creating and designing apps. Assistants were available throughout the day to work with the students on their displays and to answer any questions. The final products were elaborate and very well planned with original and diverse ideas. For example, one group designed a Robo World app featuring an interactive virtual “Andy the Robot” that could command the real “Andy” at the Science Center. Each group presented their app layout to the rest of the teens and judges awarded prizes, highlighting the best features of the apps.

Most of the schools reported having a STEAM program in their curriculum. A few of the schools, such as Quaker Valley, have basic programming classes, but not a STEAM program. Quaker Valley technology teacher, Karlton Chapman, brought four high school students to the AppJam to introduce them to STEAM programming. Chapman stated that he believes that teens will “continue looking at development with a view to design from this experience.” He also noted that he was quite pleased with the activities provided to the students that day.  Although South Fayette has a STEAM program starting with children as young as 3rd grade, teacher Aileen Owens was very impressed with the AppJam program. “It gives the teens the power to make and create and expand their capabilities”. When asked if she would bring her nine students back, Owens said “Yes!! I love it. It’s empowering for students and teachers both to go beyond boundaries.”

Winchester Thurston brought eight of their own students to the program. David Nassar, a teacher at the school, commented “It gives the students an opportunity to work with and talk to [programming experts]. This focuses on the design part, they learned team work and the steps that come before coding.” John Charrey agreed with his co-teacher’s comments and added, “You have to make sure to provide tech opportunities that are current so that the kids will stay interested. Apps are a great way to do this.” Both said that they would like their students to participate in the program again. “It was a cool opportunity, for the educator and the student. It was a different way of teaching, which was interesting for us to see. It allowed to students to get their feet wet in the subject.” Nassar was very enthusiastic in his comments.

The students left with certificates and smiles. This experience provided them with a great introduction to programming. The event allowed them to work with a team, bring a concept to light, present an app prototype and meet with experts in STEAM fields.  We can only imagine what these bright students will be able to accomplish with their skills. As Margaret Mead once said, “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”

The Titan has been described as a “real-life ‘Magic School Bus,’” except instead of Ms. Frizzle leading adventures, it’s the students themselves. “Think of it as part simulator, part video game, part classroom,” said Dream Flight Adventures Director Gary Gardiner. “All these elements combine to create an immersive learning environment that challenges students to use all of their right- and left-brain skills, plus lots of team work, to solve complex problems.”

The simulator, equipped with embedded iPads for each student to control, is specifically designed to build students’ interest in STEM subjects, and to help hone 21st-century skills such as teamwork, critical thinking, and problem solving. Creativity and art are also elements of the vessel’s curriculum, which “sends” students on a variety of missions designed by the school’s very own teachers. Writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mary Niederberger cited other nonacademic subjects addressed on the missions, including decision-making and higher-order thinking skills, which “prompt discussions on such topics as political ideology and ethics.”

Dian Schaffhauser explained the curriculum in a recent blog post for Technological Horizons in Education Journal. “The missions involve history, literature, and the humanities along with STEM concepts, to explore outer space, undersea voyages, or trips to the past,” she said. “Each student will play a role: captain, first officer, pilot, biologist, physicist, engineer, hacker, or one of seven other stations.”

Groups of four to 16 students can use the simulator at a time. It projects the adventure on a large screen, and students have been instructed to study and practice each station’s role and associated responsibilities before embarking on one of the missions. For example, the Captain is responsible for making all command decisions and ensuring that the mission is completed successfully, while the the Physicist is responsible for allocating the ship’s power supply, and the Doctor must diagnose and treat illness among the crew. Students also design a hypothesis before each mission, and to analyze the results after testing it on the mission.

The missions are varied in subject and can be modified for each grade level by Shaler’s teachers. One mission, for example, has students using fractions and proportions to shrink the vessel and send it through the human bloodstream to fight a contagious disease. To make the mission more complicated, the person in danger is a delegate sent to negotiate a peace treaty between battling civilizations.

Niederberger describes the “Pandemic” mission in more depth. “Once the vessel is inside the body, it travels through its systems to search for the disease, develop a cure and stop the plague before it spreads,” she writes. “The goal of the mission is to save lives and to remove any doubt between the two civilizations about the possibility of germ warfare.”

This is clearly moving beyond the ordinary classroom of old. And more importantly, it skillfully fuses the “three Rs” with what some are calling the four Cs: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation. But even beyond the four Cs is the concept of “deeper learning,” the subject of a recent report by the National Academies—the ability to transfer what you learn in one setting to another setting, and specifically to know when, how, and why to apply that understanding to answer further questions and solve problems. It’s not just assembling facts, but being able to make the connections from one unrelated idea to another that will help ensure that children will find their niche in this rapidly changing, highly competitive new economy. It is also the recipe for great innovators.

Although research is lacking on how to exactly teach this deeper learning and ensure that kids can make that transfer of knowledge, it seems that projects like the IKS Titan are worth more serious consideration.

Indeed, Shaler isn’t the only school testing out these new immersive tools. Oregon Middle School teacher Heidi Pankratz, profiled in this Mind/Shift piece, used an augmented reality and interactive storytelling (ARIS) tool to create an interactive program in which her students use their phones to identify a virus that is harming the animals at their local zoo. These teaching tools integrate real-world experiences with virtual information, thanks to technology such as GPS and QR codes. The games can “capture geo-tagged audio recordings, for example, or photos and videos that student players can view when they reach a particular place or meet a particular character.”

Others at the Playmaker School in California and Quest to Learn in New York City and Chicago are also using immersive educational technology, focusing more closely on discovery and learning through games and experiences that emulate what students will one day face in the real world.