We’re introducing something new:
Following on the success of our monthly Collab Lab community discussion events, we’re introducing a hands-on opportunity to explore the ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ of maker spaces as they relate to the introduction of forms of authentic learning for K12 students. Our first tour will visit the Milwaukee Jewish Day School’s Innovation Hub on Thursday, April 20th from 4-6pm. We will explore how that vision guided various design decisions they’ve made along the way– in terms of how the space is configured as well as how it is used.
Details and registration information for our first visit are here. Stay tuned for what we have coming up next.
Last night at Ward 4 The Commons revealed the teams for each of this semester’s challenges. After a getting-to-know-each-other exercise that involved great lengths of yarn and a couple of well placed metaphors, the teams got to work. Joost, Mike Cook and I walked our team through the challenge to find a sustainable way excess materials from area firms could be made available for Betty Brinn’s maker initiatives and the makerspaces/FabLabs within area schools. The team’s work for this week is to look at how other organizations have solved the problem.
We partnered with Betty Brinn Children’s Museum to formulate this challenge over the past weeks. We are challenging a team to create a pitch for a sustainable startup to provide surplus materials to the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum’s Maker Initiative as well as area school’s maker programs. We spent Sunday afternoon at Ward 4 with Carrie Wettstein and Mike Cook from Betty Brinn to introduce our challenge and meet prospective team members.
The first meeting of our makerspace/FabLab workgroup was held Tuesday evening at Ward 4.