Bentonville's Amazeum works with schools to create makers spaces

BENTONVILLE -- The Scott Family Amazeum is one of 10 family learning facilities in the country named to help bring "maker education" into classrooms.

2016-17 Hubs

The Making Spaces: Expanding Maker Education Across the Nation program hubs include:

• Albemarle County Public Schools, Charlottesville, Va.

• Amazeum, Bentonville

• Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh

• Digital Youth Network, Chicago

• Edventure Children’s Museum, Columbia, S.C.

• KID Museum, Bethesda, Md.

• Maker Education Initiative, Oakland, Calif.

• Montshire Museum of Science, Norwich, Vt.

• San Mateo County Office of Education, Redwood City, Calif.

Source: Amazeum

"Maker education is really about the practice of hands-on," said Dana Engelbert, Amazeum marketing manager. "It's getting in there with tools and materials. It focuses more on the process than on the end result."

Maker education focuses on what students learn during the creative process, whether or not the end product is what was intended from the beginning, she said.

Making Spaces: Expanding Maker Education Across the Nation is a program where participating schools are paired with a nearby hub, which could be a children's museum, school district, library or other community organization. The hubs will provide schools with guidance, professional development and support to create and sustain maker education in classrooms, according to the program's website.

The program is supported by Google's Making & Science, the Maker Education Initiative and the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.

The Children's Museum of Pittsburgh piloted the program in the 2015-16 school year with 10 schools in southwestern Pennsylvania and raised more than $100,000 to launch maker education in the schools, according to a news release. It will expand this year with 10 different hubs around the country from Redwood, Calif., to Bethesda, Md.

"We are thrilled to be able to scale this program to the national level to get more youth the resources needed to start tinkering, creating and making," Jane Werner, Children's Museum of Pittsburgh executive director, said in the news release. "A unique program that began in our region can now be run by the Scott Family Amazeum to benefit youth in Northwest Arkansas."

Amazeum officials already have been working with some schools, but being part of the Making Spaces program gives them a national framework to work with, Engelbert said. It will provide Amazeum and the other hubs with resources to help schools create a fundraising campaign for its custom maker space.

Its six partnering schools this year are Old High Middle School, Washington Junior High School and Willowbrook Elementary in Bentonville; Arkansas Arts Academy in Rogers; J.O. Kelly Middle School in Springdale; and The New School in Fayetteville.

Amazeum helped The New School open its maker space, the Tinkering Studio, for students in prekindergarten through eighth grade in the fall of 2015. It includes 3-D printers, sewing machines, a Vertical Lego Wall, programmable toys, recyclable material, donated items that can be taken apart, circuitry kits and stop-motion animation cameras, said Dennis Chapman, president and head of school.

"Learning by doing is embedded into the philosophy of our school," he said in an email. "We begin introducing our students to the Tinkering Studio in prekindergarten, which teaches them resiliency and to consider all the possibilities when working with materials."

Makers education and project-based learning teach students to think critically, problem solve, collaborate and be adaptable, Chapman said. It also fosters curiosity and imagination.

The New School recently broke ground on three buildings, including a 9,000-square-foot Innovation Center, which will house maker spaces for its middle school and upper school, Chapman said. Money raised through the Making Spaces program will go to continue to provide material for its lower school Tinkering Studio as well as provide material and items for the new maker spaces.

Washington Junior High School in Bentonville has two maker spaces. One, called the Fablab, is in Carrie Beach's room. Beach is an eighth-grade science teacher. She also is a member of the Amazeum Council of Educators and volunteers in Amazeum's Tinkering Hub.

Beach said the Fablab is available to all students before school and during lunch and is also used in her classes. She described it as a place where electronic pieces from taken apart computers, Keurig machines, cell phones and what not cover a counter. Across the room there's a 3D printer and all kinds of craft supplies.

"It is a self-service kind of place where the kids have an idea, and then they figure out how to make it happen," she said in an email.

Beach said the school hopes to use Amazeum's help to expand the maker spaces to more classrooms so students don't have to leave their own room to work in one.

NW News on 09/24/2016

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