The University of Montana spectrUM Discovery Area will implement “Making Across Montana” —a project to engage K–12 students and teachers in rural and tribal communities with making and tinkering. In collaboration with K–12 education partners in the rural Bitterroot Valley and on the Flathead Indian Reservation, the museum will develop a mobile making and tinkering exhibition and education program. The exhibition will be able to travel to K–12 schools statewide. The project team will develop a K–12 teacher professional development workshop, along with accompanying curriculum resources and supplies. The traveling program and related materials will build schools’ capacity to incorporate making and tinkering—and informal STEM experiences more broadly—into their teaching.
In partnership with early childhood service providers and elementary school systems, the Children's Museum of the Lowcountry will expand the reach of its programming to share its hands-on, play-based approach to STEM education with targeted children and educators. The museum will create a Power of Play curriculum with lesson plans that reflect best practices and focus on play-based activities to teach STEM concepts tied to grade level and state standards. The museum will train and support 40 teachers and educators from ten Head Start/First Steps early childhood centers and ten Title I elementary schools, and provide them with free Pop Up Tinker Shop (a museum on wheels) outreach visits. The trainings will build teacher confidence, promote best practices for play-based learning, support a community of practice, and enhance young learners' engagement, fascination, and attitude towards STEM. The Power of Play Curriculum will be published as a bound resource and shared with other children's museums and service providers.
The Clubhouse Network: A Global Community for Creativity and Achievement, a program of Boston's Museum of Science, will develop, pilot, and evaluate Light it Up! Engaging Young People in Digital Making Activities. Digital making activities combine design, computational thinking, and engineering practices that are all fundamental learning skills for the 21st century. Over the course of six months, the project team will develop a one-day, hands-on workshop that will give museum educators strategies to inspire a more diverse population of middle and high school-aged youth to consider educational and career pathways in STEM fields through engagement with local science centers. The workshop will be implemented twice with a group of 12 educators from regional museums. The museum will use tested evaluation tools to improve the quality and outcomes of the workshops. A successful prototype and evaluation will result in practices that can be adapted by other museums and cultural institutions to better reach young people with digital making activities.
This University of Wisconsin System will conduct research to understand how the Madison Public Library (MPL) is building a production-oriented approach to literacy and learning through their maker-focused program, the Bubbler. On a national level, this project speaks to educational research communities, professionals, members of informal learning institutions, and organizers of designed makerspaces. At the local level, it addresses underserved populations in the Madison area and MPL in evaluating and developing the Bubbler. Findings will be shared through conference presentations, journal articles, and networks of library professionals.