I had the pleasure of creating 10 shiny new lessons for Makey Makey this summer. If you haven’t seen them, I hope you’ll hop on over and not only check them out, but hack them to create your own kind of “maker mischief” in your classroom. There are lessons to get students started coding, DIY Makey Makey switches for your favorite distance/rate/time Hot-wheels lesson, and tips on creating musical water!

The story behind how I came to write these lessons is a pretty good one, and I was going to share it with you in a super long post, but I had a very enjoyable little fireside chat with the Makey Makey team and they’ve got the whole feature on their blog. Plus, I think this conversation really captures the philosophy behind my idea of why the makerspace is located in our library.

Republished below:

Thursday 08 Oct 2015

Fireside Chat: Colleen Graves — Learning: Curved.

The lady behind our swish new suite of Makey Makey lessons gives us the skinny on how it all came together, and explains how a new breed of ‘teacher librarians’ are disrupting mainstream education with some maker mischief.

A little about you please…
I’m from Denton, Texas, where I work at a local High School as a teacher librarian. This is my thirteenth year teaching teenagers! I taught English and Reading courses for nine years and this is my fourth year as a librarian. I’ve always been a maker as I have a degree in photography and a knack for sewing.

Hold up… ‘teacher librarian’? Surely one can’t be both?!
Indeed they can! We have the freedom to champion off-curriculum stuff without the constraints of officially sanctioned learning. But that doesn’t mean we don’t teach…

There’s a new kind of librarian emerging — and it’s not just me, there are others — that’s determined to give kids somewhere to experiment: a dedicated ‘makerspace’ in their libraries.

We’re listening…
A makerspace is somewhere kids can try and make whatever they want. Letting them tinker and not giving them straight instructions teaches them that there are many different ways to problem solve. The important part is getting kids to use technology and not just consume it. I tell my students: ‘Stop playing games and make something!’

When I first started working in a school library, I knew I wanted a makerspace for my students At the time, the concept was still very loose, but for me, I just wanted a place where a kid could make anything they wanted. But these kinds of activities aren’t covered in typical curriculum.

How involved are other teachers in ‘making’?
While there is definitely a maker movement infiltrating the schools system — and a good level of support for makerspaces from school admin, principals, as well as school districts — a lot of teachers have yet to realise just what devices like Makey Makey can do.

Some do get involved in maker initiatives. There’s an obvious link with the sciences, for example. But technology’s so ingrained in kids’ lives today, there’s a real opportunity for those teaching all kinds of subjects to use tech like Makey Makey in their lessons.

So when did you first encounter Makey Makey?
In 2012 when I was writing a grant for makerspace supplies, I came across the almighty banana piano. It was love at first sight. I started tinkering with Makey Makey soon after, when working at a middle school. But we got a little more crazy last year when a school in Florida invited my school to take part in a Makey Makey Challenge.

Which brings us neatly onto how you came to write the lesson plans! Do tell…
Over the last few years, I’ve become a bit of an advocate for Makey Makey’s use in education. After I spoke at a couple of teacher’s conferences, I started getting emails and tweets from other teachers asking for tips and ideas on using Makey Makey in school, so I wanted to create a resource that anyone involved in education could pick up and run with.

Earlier this year I tweeted JoyLabz and told them we were looking for some new ideas on using Makey Makey beyond the banana. The JoyLabz team invited us to Skype with them, and ended up doing an entire Q&A session with the whole class. Jay and the guys were great; they really inspired the students; telling them they were awesome and encouraging them to ‘just start doing stuff’, which really gave them some creative confidence. We kept in touch, and I told the guys they needed some lesson plans… they told me to go ahead and write them. So I did!

Were you already teaching the lessons, or did you create them for this project?
I’d done the game controller lesson and the interactive room challenge before; the rest I created for this project. At first I felt weird about drawing up an ‘official’ set of lesson plans — since maker education is all about tinkering to learn — but the goal was to create 10 of them that showed how Makey Makey could be used in a range of subject areas.

How well have people engaged with the lesson plans so far?
Great! It’s early days, but over the summer lots of people have been contacting me with questions and I’ve had requests from lots of schools; I’ve even heard from a community college that they are busy instructing their faculty on utilizing Makey Makey in their academic courses! It seems lots of teachers are now taking notice, and those who ‘get it’ are teaching others; particularly as more school administrators are buying Makey Makeys as learning resources.

What is it about Makey Makey that makes it such an important educational tool?
I love its versatility. Makey Makey is a great entry point into STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects, and can be used to enhance learning across a broad range of others. It’s the ideal tool for fostering the next generation of innovators and problem solvers.

I started with Arduino, which can be very difficult for beginners. Makey Makey is so much simpler to use if you’re just starting out. The levels of complexity can be scaled up and down. This summer I taught the logic puzzle class (designed for teens) to some six year olds. I scaled back the more complex elements, and it was great — all of them enjoyed it. I tried to design all the lessons that way by making them easy to hack. Learning as you go is as much a part of the process for me as it is for the students.

What’s next for the lesson plans?
I’ve always thought of them as somewhere to start — a way in. I’d really like someone to take the resources and make them even more phenomenal.

I ‘might’ also be working on a project book for makerspaces that will showcase a few new Makey Makey lessons… watch this space!

Thanks Colleen!!
Colleen’s always happy to hear from fellow teachers, librarians, and makers. Tweet her @gravescolleen with any questions, advice, or ideas! To find out more about her work, read her recent Edutopia article or visit her blog to read about her makerspace obsessions.

Pictures by Liz Haas and Colleen Graves

Had a great couple of days this week facilitating Mr. S’s BLAST classes! We challenged the students to do some simple programming with Sphero using the Tickle App.

Our goals were to:

teach the students some collaboration/teamwork skills
introduce the concept of coding
teach students to own their failures and learn from them
teach students to problem solve for different outcomes

Lucky for me, I was able to borrow a great lesson from my #superlibrarianhubs, Aaron Graves that he taught with AVID students last year.

Mr. S and Mrs. R paired BLAST students ahead of coming to the library, and we showed them a quick video about Sphero featuring Grant Imahara.

I had them spread out around the library to test drive Sphero with the Drive app for a few minutes (because you always have to let them play a little bit to get them engaged.) However, once we start programming, I warned the students that I will take the iPads and Spheros from them if they used the drive app instead of programming. (I know, I know, mean librarian…)

After their initial drive, we brought them back together to teach them a few coding tricks. I kept things simple and taught them that every program needs a “When” block and posed the question, “Why?” A few gamers quickly realized, that if you don’t tell your game/program “When to start,” you can write all the code in the world, but nothing will happen.

Before class, I’d made 12 stations around the library with tape. An initial red dot of tape to start and a long red piece of tape for the stop. I also put a second orange piece of tape to place the obstacle so that students could easily grab an obstacle for that section of the lesson. The first challenge was for students to program Sphero to drive from the start and stop on the tape. Even though programming Sphero to drive in a straight line sounds easy, it is actually quite a difficult task. Lining up the tail light is tough for the novice, but adjusting the time to get it stop at the stop line is where the real fun begins. It’s also hard to catch these successes on video!

My favorite part of this lesson was discussing how we all solved the problem with different solutions. The students were able to adjust speed and the length of drive time for different outcomes. Some students even noticed that certain areas of the library had more friction and so even the same drive time would not guarantee the same result! We were secretly teaching them physics!

The students were also challenged to drive around an obstacle and jump a ramp. For this, I added more “motion” block knowledge to the students’ toolbox, and I loved listening to them plan their strategies out loud. I could definitely see the Martinez and Stager Think Make Improve process at work. The best part of the lesson was really discussing what works best programming-wise and discussing why some teams were more successful than others. The most successful teams were the ones who just started trying and weren’t afraid to fail. Which led me to sharing how Thomas Edison had over a 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at creating the lightbulb (which I learned reading Creative Confidence based on Diana Rendina’s suggestion), and that if he had given up, we’d be sitting there in the dark.

Our last challenge was “The Slow Race” we had students program Sphero to drive from the start to the stop and the winner would be the student who took THE MOST time getting there. We discussed why Sphero wouldn’t roll with under 10% speed on the carpet versus the smooth table and one student even had a great hack where they started Sphero at 25% and then dropped down to 7% because the initial inertia would keep it moving!

So the teachers and I pressed the students to “own their failures and learn from them.” We taught them some basic coding skills and we saw some great examples of teamwork. Now the teachers want to come back next month for a communication/programming exercise where we have an obstacle course in between the stacks and one student has to tell the other student how to create the program and the student programming Sphero can not see the course.

Until then, we are going to be trying out a new art trick I found over at iPad Art Room where the students program Sphero and create light trail art!

Sphero Light art made by my 6 YO

Logistics Tip: We only used 12 Spheros at a time so that we could charge the other 12 Spheros for the next class. I also have my Spheros paired with specific iPads and I had them laid out for students ahead of time. Sometimes, Sphero can still be cranky, so I brought one of my mobile charging units to the classroom area in case we had to reset any Spheros. I left the other 12 charging in my office so it was clear which Spheros were charging for class and which ones we were using for that period!