This is a media curation page for the PIRatE Lab's AARR Program. We are developing practical, low cost programs to monitor resources in our coastal zone (the land near the ocean and the ocean near the land) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs aka "drones") overhead and subtidal Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) . Enjoy!!
Google is releasing a new hardware product called Coral. While it looks like a Raspberry Pi clone, Coral is a lot more ambitious. According to Google, it will make artificial intelligence more accessible to the public than ever before. Here's what you need to know.
Part of the appeal of the maker movement is its expansiveness. Electronics, coding, fashion design, audio engineering, filmmaking, woodworking—it’s all on the maker smorgasbord.
A new opportunity from Digital Promise challenges students to check a couple items off of that list at the same time.
The FilmMAKER Challenge asks middle and high school students to “reinvent an everyday product to make it more sustainable, accessible, or beautiful”—and meanwhile make a short documentary video that narrates that process. Students must work in groups with an adult mentor and submit their entries by March 24. Winners will be invited to present their products and films at the Bay Area or New York Maker Faires later in the year.
Following the progress of MakerBot, it is easy to be despondent about the whole desktop 3D printing industry. For a short time back in 2010, MakerBot was 3D printing.
Anyone who wanted a desktop 3D printer could buy a MakerBot kit or build a RepRap. MakerBot was the market leader and almost synonymous with desktop 3D printing for many years.
In April, MakerBot announced it would lay off its factory workers, outsourcing the manufacturing of all MakerBot printers to Jabil.
PIRatE Labs insight:
A great example of where at tech company needed to grow up and get some real business acumen in place. And instead, just failed to grow and continue to innovate.
If you are going to start making substandard product, China will eat you for lunch. They have mastered cheap manufacturing.
Pick the right board for your project! We help you compare features and prices for 40 popular boards, both microcontrollers and single board computers.
It might have been the banana piano. Or perhaps the bongos, made from lemons that students had plucked from the citrus tree at school. Elizabeth Little, who teaches middle school math and science, doesn’t know exactly which of the hands-on projects she introduced to her remedial math class turned the class around. But by the end of the school year, all her math students, not just those needing extra support, were clamoring for more math.
As is often the case with innovations in learning and teaching, getting started with that first lesson or project is the biggest hurdle. So it is with making, a learning approach that allows students to learn by doing and solve problems with tinkering and trial and error.
Despite what you may have heard, maker projects and makerspaces don’t require expensive equipment like 3D printers or laser cutters.
Check out the small-scale maker projects that attendees were doing in the Maker Playground at ISTE 2015:
The library is a place of engagement, learning, discovery, belonging, community, creativity and innovation.
A makerspace is a place of engagement, learning, discovery, belonging, community, creativity and innovation.
In schools, the library is the only learning space not limited by curriculum; it is an open learning space, which can be interpreted in many ways, and I suggest that this is why so often makerspaces find their place there. Outside of schools, public libraries are increasingly one of the only ‘3rd places‘ where people can feel free to meet, collaborate and learn, without the pressure to spend (even coffee shops move you along if you linger without a coffee in front of you). Not to mention that library staff are often the most open to new, exciting and innovative ways of interacting and engaging with learning and technology!
The Maker Movement is a technological and creative revolution underway around the world. Fortunately for educators, the Maker Movement overlaps with the natural inclinations of children and the power of learning by doing. Embracing the lessons of the Maker Movement holds the keys to reanimating the best, but oft-forgotten learner-centered teaching practices. New tools and technology, such as 3D printing, robotics, microprocessors, wearable computing, e-textiles, “smart” materials, and new programming languages are being invented at an unprecedented pace. The Maker Movement creates affordable — even free — versions of these inventions, and shares tools and ideas online, creating a vibrant, collaborative community of global problem-solvers.
A volunteer team of Northrop Grumman employees come together in the FabLab to brainstorm, design and build mobility solutions for Raul Pizarro––an artis
"October 31 to November 4, 2016 is Media Literacy Week! This year’s theme is Makers & Creators and focuses on all the ways young Canadians can become more creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial by embracing media production, remixing, maker, and DIY culture and coding. Find more information at http://www.medialiteracyweek.ca/, and follow along with #MedLitWeek!"
Just prior to this year’s National Week of Making (6/17- 6/23), a group of researchers and practitioners who are interested in the study of making as learning met at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh on May 23 & 24 2016. The convening was funded by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), with the understanding that the meeting would explore various aspects of making and learning, and ultimately produce an edited research volume that would describe the state of the art in making and its potential future directions. The work of the meeting, which included representatives from museums, science centers, universities, libraries and other makerspaces built directly on discussions from a 2015 Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded convening designed to identify areas of traction in research and learning in making and tinkering settings and activities.
“Making should be an opportunity we provide to all people,” he continues. “Starting at very young ages, we have to grow and nurture our young people. Schools will eventually come on board and we need them. But most of the modeling happening in this country right now is going on outside of the schools. This is where young people get turned on.”
“By creating an environment where young people can play, experiment, and make mistakes, where they can learn to solve problems, where they can flourish artistically, where they can use code just like a paint brush or a musical scale — all of these things are what make for a more complete and well-rounded individual,” Carew says. “Ultimately, they become more confident, curious and capable.”
As the way we learn and work has evolved, teaching styles, curriculum and classroom spaces must change as well. Our students need to think “like innovators” in order to solve increasingly complex, global and multi-disciplinary problems. These problems require skills like flexible thinking, resilience and curiosity — skills that are not nurtured in today’s traditional educational models. As architects, we know that design can profoundly affect and enhance teaching and learning. School design must not only accommodate 21st century learning methods, but also reinforce the skills students will need for an evolving society. Thoughtful, creative and flexible design of these spaces is critical in realizing the learning goals.
Perfect Storm: an expression that describes an event where a rare combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically. The term is also used to describe an actual phenomenon that happens to occur in such a confluence, resulting in an event of unusual magnitude.
In August 2010 I took my first solar machine - the Sun-Cutter - to the Egyptian desert in a suitcase. This was a solar-powered, semi-automated low-tech laser cutter, that used the power of the sun to drive it and directly harnessed its rays through a glass ball lens to ‘laser’ cut 2D components using a cam-guided system. The Sun-Cutter produced components in thin plywood with an aesthetic quality that was a curious hybrid of machine-made and “nature craft” due to the crudeness of its mechanism and cutting beam optics, alongside variations in solar intensity due to weather fluctuations.
PIRatE Labs insight:
This is a super cool 3D "printer" that melts sand into 3D glass objects.
When I first started my makerspace at Stewart Middle Magnet School back in January of 2014, I was figuring everything out as I went along. The term was still brand new, I couldn’t find any maker sessions at conferences, and there... Read More ›
"One of the most amazing transformations that has taken place at NMHS is the creation of the Makerspace in what was our traditional library. A space that was once a barren wasteland is now a thriving learning metropolis where students flock to tinker, invent, create, collaborate, work, and most importantly, learn. When I hired Laura, I basically told her the budget, and she had complete control of how she wanted to use the money. I could never have imagined how quickly she could radically transform this outdated space, using money that previously had always been spent on books, magazines, and electronic databases. Some quick highlights include the following:"
Connecting content to the real world. Encouraging inventive thinking. Appealing to all learning modalities. What's not to like? One thing, maybe...the death of a "traditional" library. Based on the description of the "barren wasteland" that was the library in this school before it became a Makerspace, maybe that death had already happened.
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