Makey Makey Invention Workshop Make-Me Happy!

This is a tough time of year for new learning. The weather is changing. Parent teacher conferences are underway. Grades are due. People are in need of a break.

And yet despite all of these very real factors that weigh into the learning curve in a school year, I had a group of educators who worked with me earlier this week on using Makey Makey for their classroom. I was fortunate enough to host another Makey Makey Invention Literacy workshop and it was the perfect medicine for my soul.

Even though I am no longer in the classroom I still feel the ebb and flow of a school year. It is easy to get caught up in the negative talk that surrounds education. I wish I could just livestream a whole workshop so community, parents, students, and anyone who feels they have a right to make decisions or judge educators could see how powerful and amazing educators are! It really is something that does not get expressed enough. Unfortunately, the negative or bad press seems to sell and we wonder why we have such misconceptions about educators.

Anyways….

Every single time I get to work with a room of educators for one day or two days I walk away so energized and excited for education. This workshop was no exception. I came home just loaded with energy and could not wait to show my kids and my wife(who is a teacher) what these outstanding educators learned and created in one day.

Let’s dive in so hopeufully you can feel the energy and passion.

First, one of the things I love most about these types of hands on learning workshops is the diversity. We have educators who teach 1st grade, 4th grade, middle school, STEM classes, language arts, science, etc. It is not too often we are able to bring such powerful educators from different perspectives into one room for learning. I think this is one of the key elements that allows such powerful thought to develop.

Step 1: Room Setup

Before they arrived, I packed up all my goodies that I possess and tried to transform a pretty standard looking meeting room into a temporary makerspace. It is not perfect, but nothing in education is ever perfect. It is a great reminder that teachers face these type of constraints all the time. I brought in everything that I could think of that would do one thing

Eliminate any mental barrier that would prevent a teacher from pushing beyond their comfort zone.

Here are some pictures. I will be posting two videos of everything I pack as an instructor and everything I pack in the goodie bag for participants which you will see below.

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Once I had things laid out my next step was to get their bags all ready for them. I believe in creating an experience so I bought some bags from the dollar store and put together a nice little gift bag for them. Everything in this bag as well as anything they make they could keep as part of their participation and being brave.

I also bring in some basic examples of projects so they can see what is possible. I try not to make them too fancy where it overwhelms, but rather creates curiosity and new ideas!

Finally, I bring my cardboard cutting technique example board to help them have another visual of how to make when they dive into their work. You can see the tutorial here as well as a review of my favorite cardboard tools.

Step 2: The Workshop in the Morning

I am not going to go into detail over every single little thing we do as this can all be found on my workshop website, but after we started things off with creating new high fives with our new friend we dove into making. We made circuits, switches, four way switches, buttons, graphite pencil interactive boards, introduced ourselves to Scratch and how to program(which is new for so many), and really just immersing ourselves into what can we actually do with the Makey Makey. I view the morning as a confidence booster. Every single workshop I hear people murmer the phrases, “I am not creative!” or “I am not good at this” or “This is not for me!” and yet by the end of they day they have defied all these mental barriers and built outstanding prototypes. The morning is really designed to ease them into the making and learning and more importantly the believing in the posssibilities of Makey Makey and themselves.

I love it when our work area starts in the morning like this

and by lunch break it looks like this

This lets me know we are reaching the mindset of a 4 year old where we are asking lots of questions, trying to figure out, “What if?”, and prototyping our way into new learning pathways.

By lunch these educator blew me away. I saw some of the best designs. I felt like a proud parent. They were really going above and beyond the typical work. Check out some of these I was able to capture. I wish I captured more and recorded video, but it is just too busy to get it all done. Check out the detail in these builds. The focus and determination of these educators had me feeling so good about the work being done in schools in our area. I know that if this is the energy they bring to the classroom each day our students are in great hands.

The drawings were awesome. There were some amazing flower designs and more that I simply did not capture. As for the buttons check out the piano and the four way switches. For those that have not made one of these this can be challenging to think through if you have not done one before.

Step 3: The Workshop in the Afternoon

By this point we are ready to take a break. We have been going full throttle making all morning and it is good to break. Before they leave for lunch I share with them that when we return the afternoon is their time. I give them one goal and that is to create something that can be used in their classroom tomorrow. I believe in being practical. If we want new ideas to stick they cannot leave with more homework, but rather leaving with something to use.

When they came back from their lunch where they had time to actually enjoy their food, chew slowly, and not multitask, we jump into the action. We explore Invention Literacy and I share with them all the resources and project ideas I have gathered on the workshop site. They are given about 2 hours to go forth and build. They know that at the end they will all share so we can celebrate their genius as well as gain new ideas from others.

Holy cow! The projects in this round were SUPER BODACIOUS!

They worked so hard creating really amazing things for their students and classrooms. What I love most about this part of the workshop is how quickly they dive into their learning zone and are really in their own world making, learning, and problem solving. We see them coming together trying to help one another, problem solve, and learn from the ideas of others.

It is not just silos of learning and making. It just naturally happens when you create the conditions. The had to learn so much. The beauty of all of this is that I learn just as much. I was learning new ideas and absorbing their energy. It was so good.

The Projects

Here are some of the final projects people created. We had some partner up and some cross collaboration which is just groovy!

Exit Ticket Tracker

We had two people make their own exit ticket project. One is a junior high language arts teacher and another teaches 1st grade. This was an awesome monthly challenge last month on #makeymakeychallenge and I could not believe how good these turned out. The power in conversation about the multiple uses and learning space design was incredible. More incredible was that both of these educators were using Makey Makey for the first time. They went from Zero to Hero! Not only did they build circuits and panels, but they wrote code that allows you to import data into spreadsheets. We spent time learning how to convert the data into Google Sheets as most do no use Excel. So cool!

Next up was this Montessori educator who created this SWEET guitar. The possibilities of this project with her students is going to be really powerful. I look forward to see what she does with this idea with her students.

I think she is ready to join KISS for their farewell tour. It plays actual guitar sounds! We talked about so many projects for the classroom centered around musical instruments. Knowing her, this is just the start of someting crazy good!

Next is this phenomenal STEM teacher that does incredible work in her classroom. We were working on a project that would help students better understand circuits and how they work using Makey Makey before diving into Arduino and Raspberry Pi. We learned something new that we could actually control two different light outputs using the Key Out and Mouse Out wires. From there we could control several lights with each trigger. In the end she made these cool origami LED builds so that when the flower petals touched the flower would light up. We worked through more time thinking about classroom application and in then end she created these cool looking origami LED structures.

Last, but not least we had these three project who were all separate, but are under the same umbrella. We have junior high science, K-4 TAG, 5-6 Literacy and Technology, and K-8 Instructional coach all showcasing how universal these projects can be.

The first one is designed around a project where students could create a presentation around photosynthesis using Makey Makey, Scratch, and their voices. She had visuals on the screen as well as the display. We worked and reworked how to create buttons while also hiding all the wires. We figured it out and in the end it turned out great!(I will make a tutorial on how soon)

The second one pertains to a project where students study a country or area. In this case they made an example of Canada so the buttons trigger information about animals, weather, geography,etc. The cool element to this is that students have to compare their research to where they live. Their project contains the use of Scratch and voice recording as well.

The third one is around the water cycle. Students would explain the various steps of the process. She has a cool little song that will forever be stuck in my end embedded on one of the buttons. The use of paint really brings this alive.

Wrapping It Up

As I always state when I reflect on these days I have to say THANK YOU! These educators have renewed my faith in education just like prior events where I get to work with these amazing human beings. These are the stories that should be in the newspaper. These are moments that teachers are trying to figure out how to weave into their classrooms while trying to manage all the other mandates that are sucking the life out of learning.

These are the people that make a difference. These are the people that continue to motivate me to do this work. These are the people that make me miss the classroom as I see the difference they can make in the lives of students.

If we just give educators the space to breathe, the space to create, the time to enter their zone, then they can do marvelous things. AND if we could provide the same for our students schools would simply be a building of inventions and ideas.

This was a fantastic day and I hope I get a chance to work with these educators again in the future and feed off their energy as this is what learning is all about!