Makerspace Professional Books

A successful school makerspace needs an enthusiastic maker community, school-wide participation, and staff support. How do you build this type of learning at your school? The innovative team behind Challenge-Based Learning in the School Library Makerspace addresses common questions and concerns and describes step-by-step how to introduce challenge-based learning into the school library makerspace.

From a prominent educator, author, and founder of Harvard’s Change Leadership Group comes a provocative look at why innovation is today’s most essential real-world skill and what young people need from parents, teachers, and employers to become the innovators of America’s future.

Filled with anecdotes, observations and recommendations from professionals on the front line of transformative education, case histories, and groundbreaking research—and written with Robinson’s trademark wit and engaging style—Creative Schools will inspire teachers, parents, and policy makers alike to rethink the real nature and purpose of education.

The book is aligned with the National Research Council’s new Framework for Science Education, which includes an explicit focus on engineering and design content, as well as integration across disciplines. Extensive case studies explore real world examples of innovative programs that take place in a variety of settings, including schools, museums, community centers, and virtual spaces.

In this must-read book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, athletes, students, and business people—both seasoned and new—that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called “grit.”

Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, MacArthur “genius” Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. Rather, other factors can be even more crucial such as identifying our passions and following through on our commitments.

Kids walk into schools full of wonder and questions. How you, as an educator, respond to students’ natural curiosity can help further their own exploration and shape the way they learn today and in the future.

The traditional system of education requires students to hold their questions and compliantly stick to the scheduled curriculum. But our job as educators is to provide new and better opportunities for our students. It’s time to recognize that compliance doesn’t foster innovation, encourage critical thinking, or inspire creativity—and those are the skills our students need to succeed.

Using technology to make, repair or customize the things we need brings engineering, design and computer science to the masses. Fortunately for educators, this maker movement overlaps with the natural inclinations of children and the power of learning by doing. The active learner is at the center of the learning process, amplifying the best traditions of progressive education. This book helps educators bring the exciting opportunities of the maker movement to every classroom.

LAUNCH: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student provides a process that can be incorporated into every class at every grade level ... even if you don’t consider yourself a “creative teacher.” And if you dare to innovate and view creativity as an essential skill, you will empower your students to change the world—starting right now.

This book takes you step-by-step through starting your maker program--from finding the right "makerspace mix," making a plan, and working with staff to establishing funding and support, launching your makerspace, and evaluating and refining your programs.

The authors of Make Just One Change argue that formulating one’s own questions is “the single most essential skill for learning”—and one that should be taught to all students.

They also argue that it should be taught in the simplest way possible. Drawing on twenty years of experience, the authors present the Question Formulation Technique, a concise and powerful protocol that enables learners to produce their own questions, improve their questions, and strategize how to use them.

Based on the work at the Stanford University d.school and its Environments Collaborative Initiative, _Make Space _is a tool that shows how space can be intentionally manipulated to ignite creativity. Appropriate for designers charged with creating new spaces or anyone interested in revamping an existing space, this guide offers novel and non-obvious strategies for changing surroundings specifically to enhance the ways in which teams and individuals communicate, work, play--and innovate.

This is a book for parents and other educators--both formal and informal, who are curious about the intersections of learning and making. Through stories, research, and data, it builds the case for why it is crucial to encourage today's youth to be makers--to see the world as something they are actively helping to create.

Drawing on the work of Carol Dweck, Daniel Pink, Art Costa, and others, the authors show how to lead students to a growth mindset for school-and life-by focusing on five crucial, research-driven attitudes:

optimism-putting aside fear and resistance to learn something new
persistence-keeping at it, even when a task is hard
flexibility-trying different ways to find a solution
resilience-bouncing back from setbacks and learning from failure
empathy-learning by putting oneself in another person's shoes.

To succeed in the global economy, students need to function as entrepreneurs: resourceful, flexible and creative. Researcher and Professor Yong Zhao unlocks the secrets to cultivating independent thinkers who are willing and able to create jobs and contribute positively to the globalized society.

Get the nuts and bolts on imagining, planning, creating, and managing a cutting-edge Makerspace for your school community. Nationally recognized expert Laura Fleming provides all the answers in this breakthrough guide. From inception through implementation, you’ll find invaluable guidance for creating a vibrant Makerspace on any budget.

This easy-to-follow, fun guide teaches you all about green screen technology and shows, step-by-step, how to create interesting, professional-grade special effects. The book is packed with simple, start-to-finish projects and challenges. Detailed photos and illustrations are provided throughout to insure success.

The Art of Tinkering is an unprecedented celebration of what it means to tinker: to take things apart, explore tools and materials, and build wondrous, wild art that’s part science and part technology. Join 150+ makers as they share the stories behind their beautiful and bold work—and use the special conductive ink on the cover to do some tinkering yourself!

Robinson argues that organizations everywhere are trying to fix a problem that originates in schools and universities. Many people leave education with no idea what their creative abilities and strengths are. Here, Robinson shows what individuals can do to recover their creative talents.

You've heard the complaints too many times: When am I ever going to use this in the real world? Why are we learning this? When are we going to learn about something interesting? But what if your students came to class excited? What if they were passionate about their projects? What if they grasped the connection between today's work and tomorrow's careers? In classrooms across the nation, innovative teachers are employing passion-based, open-source learning to improve their student's education. In Pure Genius, Don Wettrick encourages teachers and administrators to collaborate--with experts, students, and one another--to create interesting, and even life-changing opportunities for learning.

On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a "knowledge worker," based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing. Using his own experience as an electrician and mechanic, Crawford presents a wonderfully articulated call for self-reliance and a moving reflection on how we can live concretely in an ever more abstract world.

Are you ready to create a space that empowers student learning? The spaces where your students come to learn can free them to think creatively and empower them to collaborate and share their work with others. Or those learning spaces can stifle creativity and stall progress. How you design the space makes all the difference.

Created by an international team of architects and designers concerned about our failing education system, The Third Teacher explores the critical link between the school environment and how children learn, and offers 79 practical design ideas, both great and small, to guide reader’s efforts to improve our schools.

Lawyers. Accountants. Radiologists. Software engineers. That's what our parents encouraged us to become when we grew up. But Mom and Dad were wrong. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of "left brain" dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which "right brain" qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate.