Make Your Makerspace Sign Challenge

aarmau@gmail.comSeptember 5, 20182#maker9, 2018, full stack learners

The new season of monthly build challenges for your learning space, makerspace, school, workshop, classroom is finally here! I am so excited to share this one with everyone. This has taken a great deal of time to prepare and put together, but I know that the results are going to be amazing!

Everything you need is below. If you need anything else, then please reach out. Throughout the month I will share other tutorials and tips and as others share we will have those examples as well.

As we always talk about in my workshops, be sure to document the journey and share! We have community of learners and makers and the only way we all get better is through sharing, supporting, and interacting with one another.

All our work and correspondence along with questions, help, techniques, etc. will be over in our Full Stack Learner Community. We have a Monthly Build Challenge channel for us to share all of our work in this space.

Please be sure to share your work, your journey, questions, ideas, and more with me and the group. This will allow this project to improve and empower one another through sharing.

Here is the link to the official site

 

Video for Educators: A video to help you get started.

Video for Students: Just in case you need a project launch!

Project Overview
At the beginning of the school year or the opening of a new makerspace and/or learning space there is tremendous opportunity to showcase to students that their voices matter. A great first activity to build community and ownership of a space for making and innovation is to have students work together to come up with a name for the space.

If you don’t have a name, then come up with a process and be sure to share with us how you created the name.

If you already have a name, how did this name come to be?

Share in our Full Stack Learner Community

Once a name is decided, then comes the fun part. Allow students to work by themselves or in groups to make a sign for the space. You can choose to display only one or all. You can rotate the signs throughout the year. The system is up to you. What is important is that students feel ownership in the space and see a celebration of all work so they want to come back and do more making!

The importance of the sign

  • A good looking sign can be a key element in the design of the space
  • A student created sign provides the evidence of the investment of student ownership in the space
  • Allows adults and students to work together so both can see how we can work together
  • A sign is never permanent. You can start simple and over time add more elements to the sign as you and your students develop new skills.

Learning Targets
  1. Students will understand the safety procedures of the makerspace through a hands on project instead of a sit and get.
  2. Students will demonstrate how to work with others to collectively come up an agreed upon name.
  3. Students will creatively express their ideas through a hands on project.

This project applies to
  • Creating community in your makerspace
  • Introducing new making concepts if you choose to include
    • LED lights
    • Arduino
    • How cut cardboard
    • How to cut wood
    • How to paint
    • This really depends on what you want to introduce to your students
  • A nice icebreaker to introduce students to the space through hands on experience
  • Working with students to learn how to work together

Educator Resources
Before you launch this project with your students make sure you

  1. Determine size constraint of the sign
  2. Determine shape constraint of the sign
  3. Determine the materials available
  4. Allow students private reasoning time to sketch out a plan before they start building
  5. Determine how many students will be involved
    1. If you have a lot of students consider assigning students to a letter of the name. For example, if you have the default name “Makerspace” you have 10 letters. You now have 10 groups that you can put kids in to develop each letter. They will have to work together to make sure everything flows.
    2. You can have each “class” make a sign that is shared or put up each month to provide variety as another option.

Participant Resources
This is up to the individual educator for this project. The participants are the students involved in this project so you must provide them with the following:

  • Materials they are able to use for building and making
  • Tools they are allowed to use
  • Handout/Slide/Poster of the constraints of the sign so they know what the constraints are for the project
  • Time and space to think, explore, and make

Before you teach….
Consider the age of your students and what tools you want to provide. If this is the first time students have accessed your space you might want to use simple tools and materials. You could organize the space in a way that as they create and make they are doing a sort of scavenger hunt to discover what is all available.

If you want to introduce a specific concept i.e. Arduino and LED you could make these items a required element of the build.

Consider time, materials, and cost before you launch. You want to make sure everyone can complete the project.

Follow Up
After you have your sign(s) you don’t have to stop there

  1. Continue to hack your sign(s) as you develop new skills to showcase that all work is never finished.
  2. You can continue to make new signs. Consider making signs for
    1. Maker stations
    2. Signs for other spaces in the building
    3. Taking orders for teachers

 

Share Your Work

Use this template to have students create their guide for their project. Have them take pictures and video and fill out the template. Be sure to share with me. We have a much bigger cause in development of students creating a handbook of projects and what it means to learn that will be shared globally. This is the first piece to this project. Share the work with me so I can begin to curate into the maker notebook.

Sign Instructable

Easy Wooden Sign for Makerspace or Work Studio

*more coming soon throughout the month

Here is a Google Doc version of this project in case you need this format.

2 throughts on "Make Your Makerspace Sign Challenge"

  1. Hi Aaron…Karl from Sydney here. Like the idea of a Maker Space sign challenge. Is this challenge just on for the month of September? We have 2 more weeks of school here in New South Wales and then its a two week break. Will get my Maker Space ‘Cadets’ onto it straight away. All the best – from down under.

    Reply

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