Inside The IU School Of Education’s New Maker Space

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Teaching involves a lot of creativity because kids learn in a variety of ways.

Consider reading: we read to kids, they sing the alphabet and they trace letters — all different approaches that help a child learn to read and write. Getting creative with teaching is necessary no matter the subject, and a new space at Indiana University’s School of Education hopes to push teachers into new and creative spaces.

A Place To ‘Reinvent’

Kids are scattered around the maker space at the IU School of Education, playing with materials like clay and string and using machines like a 3D printer.

These are only a few of the assets in the new maker space; a room dedicated to helping teachers discover creative ways to teach tough concepts.

• Cultivating Creativity In The Classroom By Encouraging 'Making'The Indiana University School of Education opened a new maker space, which aims to help teachers learn creative and innovative ways to teach lessons in the classroom.Download

Kylie Peppler, an associate professor in the school who exclusively studies how making stuff helps kids learn, convinced the School of Ed to fund the new maker space and also devoted some grants from the National Science Foundation to get it up and running. Traditionally, maker spaces are used for science and technology innovations, which is why Pepplar says this maker space is rare.

“Our faculty here are using making to kind of reinvent what that means for literacy studies, what it means for art education, what it means for every discipline,” she says.

In this space, graduate students and faculty members use students to test the techniques they’ve created. The projects represent many subject areas.

For example, associate professor Adam Maltese wants to find a group of middle and high school students…

“To build what we’re calling an e-birdhouse, which is essentially a birdhouse but it’s wired with sensors to collect data on birds in their environment,” he says.

Students will design and construct the birdhouse giving them science and technology skills, but Maltese says they’ll also learn a lot about biology as they study birds living in the house.

In the middle of the maker space, as she sews a row of sequins onto a piece of fabric, graduate student Sophia Bender explains how teachers can use sewing to help their students learn geometry.

“It’s all about spatial reasoning,” Bender says. “You start out with this two dimensional object and you have to think about how it’s going to turn into a three-dimensional garment and fit someone. How do you take something flat and make it something round.”

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Mentally imagining this transformation is hard for a lot of students when they’re just doing math problems out of a textbook.

If new teachers get to experiment with alternative techniques, Bender says they’ll be better equipped to adapt to students’ different learning styles. And when they see a sewing machine sitting in a home economics classroom they’ll be more likely to ask to borrow it to explain something such as special reasoning to their geometry class.

Games…For Learning?

Across the room, Sean Duncan is fiddling with board game pieces, created by the 3D printer.
His project aims to push students to be creative and work on a team, using board games.

Duncan will host a game jam next semester for area kids, where they will come to the maker space for 24 hours and create a board game from scratch. They will collaborate as a group, come up with a creative concept for the game and create the physical parts needed to play.

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“If a bunch of people come together and they say we want to make a board game about X, Y and Z, how much do they need to know about X, Y and Z? Do they need to find out what XYZ is outside of the room? How do they communicate and negotiate with each other while they figure this out? How do they use the tools within the space to help them figure out how to make that game?” Duncan asks.

All of these projects establish a really important principle of making to learn; if you give kids a project they have ownership of, they’ll work harder to learn the skills needed to complete it.

Like if a student is struggling with geometry, Bender says they might not care if they get a few problems wrong on their homework.

“But if you calculate something wrong on a project you’re making and it doesn’t turn out how you want, you are motivated to try again,” Bender says.

She says that’s how we learn in the real world; when we encounter a problem, we research possible solutions and then try those methods to see what works.