Michael Mino [00:00:00]:
If we abandon digital technologies just for entertainment and socialization, then we’re missing a big piece of what it could be doing for education. The kids don’t see it as a tool for education because they’re never given the opportunity to use it for learning. So I really believe makerspaces need to embrace digital technologies, and that’s the difference between makerspace and shop of the past. We’re not focused on one technology. We’re not focused on one tool or machines.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:25]:
Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:28]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:30]:
This is the fueling Creativity and education podcast.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:34]:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:39]:
We’ll be speaking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and digging deeper into new and varying perspectives of creativity, all with the.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:50]:
Goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers and parents with knowledge they can use at home or in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:58]:
So let’s begin.

Matthew Worwood [00:01:01]:
Welcome to the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast, and today we welcome Michael Mino, an education development specialist with over 25 years of experience working in K through 16 public and private education. He is the founder of numerous innovative student programs, including the IT Leadership Academy, the Connecticut Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Student Innovation Expo, and the center for 21st Century Skills at Ed advance. And I do want to highlight, Michael was the first person to employ me when I migrated to the United States at the center for 21st Century Skills at Ed advance. He is currently serving as the director of career and maker education at Rancho del Rey in Monterey, Mexico, where he established a maker space to serve severely underprivileged boys aged five to 16. He also works as a maker education consultant for public, private, and nonprofit schools and organizations in the US, Mexico, and Africa. Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Mino [00:01:59]:
Thank you, Matthew. Thank you, Cindy. Really pleased to be here with you guys. Really looking forward to our discussion.

Matthew Worwood [00:02:05]:
Well, we’re super excited to have you on the show because we love talking about the maker movement because it’s so applicable to creativity and you have such vast experience, particularly over the last few years working in the maker space movement. So what we wanted to ask you is we kind of see an opportunity, given your background, to talk a little bit about different perspectives of the maker movement, particularly, and how it serves different groups of students in society. But before we did that, we was wondering if you could just kind of provide your overall perspective of the maker movement specifically. Why is it trending, and what is the relationship between a maker space and the school, the traditional curriculum.

Michael Mino [00:02:44]:
You’ve asked a couple of questions there. The reason it’s trending, what its relationship is to the broader school community and maker spaces, Maker experiences, maker opportunities for kids and adults, actually, too. Now, there are plenty of adult maker spaces around the world, literally, and they’re in different places. They’re informal education spaces, like schools, universities, and then they’re also informal spaces like neighborhood community centers or neighborhood, or just particularly dedicated neighborhood maker spaces, and also run by informal organizations and museums. I mean, it’s really a broad spectrum. My experience with making goes literally back to when I was a kid. My father was an airline mechanic, and we always had tools and stuff around the house, so I was always making stuff. And then I did have, my first certification was as an industrial arts teacher in my first position was actually as a woodworking teacher at a high school in Massachusetts.

Michael Mino [00:03:46]:
And so that making has always been around. And the work I do in Mexico, I look at Mexico as a real maker culture, going back to the Aztecs and the Mayans, so we could look way back. But in terms of the modern maker movement, starting with, like, make magazine, which came out sometime, I believe in the. Don’t know. I had the first issue because I have a son who’s now also running a maker space. Kind of the modern era of making, I think, comes after the demise of many of the industrial arts programs of the past. Kind of a focus on vocational ed versus comprehensive high schools having technical programs. Many of those technical programs were shut down.

Michael Mino [00:04:34]:
And a focus on STEM, which has some elements of making in it, but not exclusively, I think, kind of drove that hands on focus and experience for kids out of more formal environments. And so I think the embrace of it, I think, in some ways, is a kind of, I guess you could say it’s sort of a reaction to the digitization of everything, the experience of kids spending a lot of time on screens, spending a lot of time with digital devices, as opposed to making stuff, hands on work, learning with their hands, as some of your past guests have referred to. I think that’s, I think some of the impetus that’s propelled making forward and making it as popular as is now and continuing to be an area of growth.

Cyndi Burnett [00:05:26]:
So given your background working with students from various backgrounds and levels of socioeconomic status, I think there’s an opportunity to look at the maker movement from different perspectives. So we’d really like for you to share the work that you’ve been doing with underserved or underrepresented backgrounds.

Michael Mino [00:05:45]:
In Mexico, I’m working with an organization that mean severely underprivileged, know, lowest socioeconomic class of citizens in the city of Monterey, Mexico. And these are kids who come, and it’s predominantly this boys program, although we do have some girls who are staff children of staff on campus, and so they’re also participating in the program. But the boys come from literally living. Some of them live in shacks made of recycled materials, living adjacent to dumps, and their families make a living by scavenging for recycled materials in the dump. And literally, it’s a day to day existence. If they can make 200 pesos in a day, they have enough to buy food for that day, and sometimes they don’t. And the boys have even spoken about going for a day or more than a day without food. So these are really severely underprivileged students versus some of the students I work with and working with a project right now in two urban high schools.

Michael Mino [00:06:45]:
And those kids are also from a lower socioeconomic, underprivileged group of students, mostly from hispanic and african american population, from Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. And however, their lives are not as destitute as the lives of some of the kids I work with. In know they’re not wealthy, but they’re not living in shacks, they’re living in decent housing, and most of them have phones and access to technology. But still, in terms of educational opportunities, I think both groups suffer from opportunities, especially in the making field. Now, the kids we work with in Mexico, they’re local school. So our kids go out. We’re not a school. We’re a residential home during the school year, and the kids go out to a local school.

Michael Mino [00:07:37]:
Then on our campus, we provide supplemental services like tutoring, math tutoring, reading, writing, arts, drama, and then the maker space. So at the local school, they have no computer lab. There’s, I think, a limited arts program, maybe, but it’s very limited. And I think I somewhat see the same thing. Some urban high schools and other middle schools, elementary schools in the United States too, in urban areas where the focus is so much on, let’s just try and get these kids to read, write, and do mathematics, and we don’t have time in the schedule, or we don’t have the resources to do more than that. So that’s the population. And then in my work in Mexico, it’s kind of like the ideal maker environment, because I do have particular interests and focus in certain technologies and certain tools and machines and equipment. But I also have a lot of freedom for the kids can walk in one day and say, hey, I want to make a car, or I want to make a rocket, or they just walk in.

Michael Mino [00:08:39]:
Say, one of the older boys said the other day, I want to make a cell phone. Now, obviously, he can’t make a cell phone, but he wanted to make a mock cell phone out of a wooden block. And so that was completely on his own, his own initiative. Sure, go ahead. Let’s do that. So we have a lot of freedom. However, I think thing I want to emphasize, too, is that I think maker spaces have their own domain of knowledge and focus. So, yes, we can let kids come in and do things that are just kind of off the top of their heads or based on their passion, or.

Michael Mino [00:09:16]:
But. Or in formal education environments, especially in public schools in Massachusetts, we might be supporting the core curriculum through activities and resources and projects in the makerspace, but makerspaces have their own domain. So digital electronics, for instance, robotics, those are not areas that other people are dealing with in most schools. Just this past week, I was working in an urban high school, and we were doing an activity on solar energy. We’re building mock solar tracking panel system, a model, not a mock. We’re building a model solar panel tracking system. And I asked the kids, like, have you ever stripped a wire before? Have you ever done any programming? Have you worked with, did you know the difference between analog and digital? And some of the boys in the class were seniors, actually boys and girls. So some of them were seniors, had no experience whatsoever in this field, no experience with any of that technology, any of those components.

Michael Mino [00:10:19]:
It really struck me as thought, wow. The boys I’m working with in Mexico at six, seven, eight years old, have more experience than these seniors here in the United States. So I think that speaks to the power of the focus of what you can do in a makerspace and what you can bring in in terms of learning opportunities.

Matthew Worwood [00:10:39]:
I want to go back to two points that you’ve made in this discussion, and you had referenced about the increase in digital technology and access to digital technology. And then you also spoke a little bit about STEM and increasing our focus on certain types of education goals within the core curriculum. And there’s this element of kind of like, what does that take away from the more we’re playing with digital devices, for example, and there’s value to us interacting with digital technology. We’re potentially spending less time making things. I can relate to it with my young children at home. I used to love playing with Legos, and I’ve got all the boxes of Legos down in my basement. But I didn’t have to compete for on demand television. I didn’t have to compete to play all of these games on the iPad.

Matthew Worwood [00:11:33]:
So there’s less time in the day for everyone. And so something has to give that’s in informal learning. But then informal learning, we’re starting to see, obviously, reduction opportunities to create and make there as well. So I’m just wondering, with your experience, is it easier to put together a maker space in a formal learning environment, or is it easier to put together a maker space in an informal learning environment? What are some of the things that you’ve kind of seen? And what’s that tension between what you’re potentially taking away in each of those environments?

Michael Mino [00:12:10]:
Yeah, well, let me just comment on the digital piece first, because I don’t mean to say that in a negative sense. That’s strictly looking at digital technology from a negative sense, because I believe a maker space should incorporate digital technology. And one of my biggest, Matt, you may have heard me say this in our work together, that if we abandon digital technologies just for entertainment and socialization, then we’re missing a big piece of what it could be doing for education. The kids don’t see it as a tool for education because they’re never given the opportunity to use it for learning. So I really believe makerspaces need to embrace digital technologies. And that’s the difference between makerspace and shop of the past. We’re not focused on one technology. We’re not focused on one tool or machine.

Michael Mino [00:12:54]:
So in Mexico, I do have a 3d printer, we do have digital robotics, we do have digital programming. We have a number of different platforms that we’re doing digital program. We have robotic Lego sets that, as a matter of fact, were donated by Lego in Mexico. But we also have a couple of woodworking machines, and we also have tools and paints and drawing tools. And lately we’ve been really into jigsaw puzzles that we got hooked on during the pandemic, and we’re now working on a 6000 piece jigsaw puzzle in the makerspace. So I’m embracing both of those. And I think makerspaces have to be broadly stopped like that. And it all depends on your budget, obviously.

Michael Mino [00:13:38]:
But then back to the question of formal versus informal. Well, in informal spaces, it’s much easier to just focus on the domains within the maker space. So we don’t have to worry about supporting a language ELA project. We don’t have to worry about supporting a social studies project or a science project specific to a curriculum from that school or that grade level. Right, which many makerspaces can do. And especially when you’re talking about project based learning, capstone projects, or in 8th grade or high school capstone projects, a makerspace can become a great resource for those sort of activities and those sort of experiences for students. And again, you know, I say the makerspace has its domain. And so if we want to deal with robotics or rockets or coding or gaming, we also have a Nintendo switch in our makerspace down in Mexico.

Michael Mino [00:14:34]:
So we have a really broad range of things, and so we have our own areas that we can spend more time in that, and the kids know. Now, I think this is a major point I want to make. A makerspace can become a catalyst for deeper academic learning. And I have a perfect example of an experience I had with kids in Mexico, where I’m teaching them to do some coding within digital electronics. So we had some arduinos, we had some digital components that they’re coding, like sounds and motors and different little exercises that they would do with this set. And then they’d look at the code, but the code, the directions, if you’re familiar with coding, you could have instructions within the code that could be in Spanish. So the instructions in the code was in Spanish, but the code is English, right? The code is only using the coding is not in Spanish. Coding is English.

Michael Mino [00:15:29]:
So the kids are looking at it, and I’m explaining to them, like, here’s why you need to learn English. Look, you can understand this code and go through it line by line. And I had somebody there who was a coder who also spoke very fluent Spanish. So he was explaining to them. So at the end of that session, one of the boys said to me, he said, you know, we’re going to be the smartest kids in the school. He said, nobody else is doing this. I thought, whoa, that’s interesting. And I thought, well, that’s really great, because my goal is to give you opportunities that no one else has.

Michael Mino [00:15:58]:
On the other hand, I was kind of sad, thinking this is such a small number of kids who are having this opportunity. So later that day, I get a text from their dorm parent, and she writes to me, and she said, you’ve created monsters. She said, the boys are all in Duolingo, learning English. They all want to learn English now so they can code. So I thought, like, bingo. That’s exactly what we’re hoping to inspire. That same opportunity can happen in maker spaces, in schools. And unfortunately, too many times, maker space is sort of divided out or separated out from academics in schools.

Michael Mino [00:16:40]:
And there’s this idea that we have to teach academics in a certain way, especially in districts that are underperforming, which happen to be urban districts or lower socioeconomic districts, or more diverse districts where students are underperforming. And then the focus is on which I agree, we need to increase their academic skills. The question is, how can we do that without drilling and killing it? Which is what I’ve seen happening in many places, is a real discouragement. And the other piece of that is success in the maker space can lead to success in academic. I on numerous occasions, not just once, but on numerous occasions with different student populations in both urban, suburban, private and public, and in Mexico as well. And so I’m talking cross socioeconomic across different communities. I’ve had students who insisted they couldn’t do what I was asking them to do. Literally, I had one student say to me, don’t you know I’m stupid? I can’t do that.

Michael Mino [00:17:46]:
And this is an activity I’ve done with many different populations, from little kids to adults, and it involves creating a little robot from a toothbrush, a vibrating motor, and a watch battery. I don’t know if you’ve seen that before. Have you guys seen brushbots or you haven’t seen them? Okay, well, it’s one of these activities, Matt, you could do with, like you talked about your spaghetti towers. Spaghetti and marshmallow towers. This is another one of those activities because it’s very inexpensive. You get the head of a toothbrush, get these little vibrating motors, which used to be used in pagers, and you get a watch battery. And sometimes we add, like, pompoms and pipe cleaners and little googly eyes. And we say, okay, you’re going to create a robot.

Michael Mino [00:18:27]:
That’s the challenge. Create a robot. And there’s a number of lessons to take away from this, but one is, is it really a robot? It’s not because it doesn’t have sensors, but it has characteristics of a robot. But first thing they have to do is create a circuit. Like so, okay, given the tools you’ve given, the things you have, where’s the circuit? What’s going to drive the robot? And literally, I’ve had students and teachers, actually, I’ve had teachers say, I can’t figure this out. How does this work? What do you mean, create a robot? What do you mean, make something? Make this move like a robot. And so this one student in particular that I referenced, he was insisting, like, I’m too stupid. I don’t know how to do this.

Michael Mino [00:19:04]:
Don’t you know I’m stupid? Literally, he said it a number of times, and then he actually got it. He actually did it. And he was so thrilled. He said, oh. Mr. Can I take a picture of this and send it to my mother? She’s not going to believe I did this. And I was stunned. I was pretty stunned.

Michael Mino [00:19:20]:
I was thinking, like, holy cow, this kid in a period of 30 minutes, went from I’m stupid to I can’t believe I did this. And I got to show my mother. I mean, that really to me, spoke to the power. And I’ve seen that numbers of times, not just once. This is a recent example, but I’ve seen it numbers of times that kids experience success in the maker space. You’ve talked a lot in previous episodes about can creativity be taught? Right. I can’t remember who I heard reference this, but somebody said part of the path to becoming more creative and learning creativity is success, experiencing success. And I think, matthew, we’ve seen this in the programs we used to run together, where a student comes into our program in the first know they struggle, they have a hard time, but they learn and they experience some success.

Michael Mino [00:20:15]:
And then they come back the second year and they’re much more enthusiastic and they’re much more successful as well. So I think success is part of the key to becoming more creative and becoming more technically competent. Building technical skills requires some success, encourages you to continue to try and build those skills. And I think the same applies to creativity. Learning creativity.

Cyndi Burnett [00:20:43]:
I’m curious, you mentioned about skills. You’ve mentioned skills a number of times. And what are the skills that you see students learn when they’re in a makerspace? Because one of the things you mentioned was there’s a specific skill set that students acquire when they’re in a maker space. So what are those things that they’re trying to gain while they’re in that?

Michael Mino [00:21:07]:
You know, there’s so many, and I don’t know if you recently, if you guys have seen the Google future of Education report just released, like two weeks ago, in the last two weeks, part one, it’s going to be a three part report, and they talk about skills for the future. So skills like in creativity, obviously, is one of them, collaboration and analytics, data analysis and analytical thinking. So those are kind of broad level skills that I don’t think if we looked across the curriculum, across the different domains of academics, it’s very hard to pinpoint one area that’s focused on those skills. So I think maker spaces can be those places where we apply those skills. Oh, and learning to learn, that was another skill, and that really struck me. That was actually identified as a skill for the future, learning to learn and relearn. And I think I’ve seen that with the kids in Mexico where that example I gave where, okay, I was teaching them to code, and they realized they needed to learn English. So then they went off and figured out a way to learn English using duolingo, because we have access to some iPads.

Michael Mino [00:22:15]:
I think learning to learn is one of those skills. So I think a maker space can be a place where we, again, kind of, like, have its ownership of some of those domains. Right? And art, obviously, we’re talking about creativity, talking about expression of creativity. There are obviously some other domains other than academics that could also embrace these. But then there are skills like digital are, you know, being able to manipulate tools, hand tools in some cases. One of the first things I did with the boys in Mexico, where we have a drill press, we have a belt sander, we have a bandsaw. I don’t know if you know what those are, but they’re different woodworking machines. And one of the little boys said to me, he looked at the machine, he said, those are for the adults, right? And these are small machines.

Michael Mino [00:23:01]:
These are not big, industrial machines. These are what are called benchtop machines. They’re small. They’re meant for, like, the home workshop. I said, no, you’re going to use those, too. And he was, like, astounded. His mouth just dropped. So I designed a project where they had one operation on each of those machines, and it was very simple.

Michael Mino [00:23:20]:
For the older boys, it was a little more complicated. They had to do more to complete the operation. But for the younger boys, it was very simple. It was like, pull the handle to drill the hole, push the board through round the corner of a square on a sander, and I was right there with them, and each one of them did that. And they built a little confidence and skill on those machines. And we’ve talked about this, Matthew and I, previously, where the maker space was designed or the concept of making. Originally, when you first, I think some of the beginning of this idea was kids could come and pursue their own interests and passions and come into the maker space like they do sometimes in Mexico, and say, I want to make a car today. Okay.

Michael Mino [00:24:05]:
However, if they’ve never used any of the tools and the machines, whether it’s digital or analog or hand tool or machine tool, they don’t really know the capacity of it. Actually, this past week, I had a student say to me, I heard kids are using 3d printers in the maker space. This was a senior who hadn’t had an opportunity to take the course because it’s only a year old maker space. So I said, yeah, they are. I said, have you seen a 3d printer? He said, no, I’ve never seen one. So I showed him he was having to be in there for another class, showed him the 3d printer. He’s never had used a 3d printer before. He doesn’t know what it does, what it’s capable of.

Michael Mino [00:24:44]:
How do you even get something from in your mind to the 3d printer? So there’s a whole process that he has to learn, and that’s what an introductory course can do. That’s what we’ve designed, an introductory course where we give them experiences on each of. I have that sort of informally in Mexico. So they have experiences in the different areas. They do a little activity, whether it’s a little brushbot robot activity, more complex activity like 3d printing, where they’re learning a CAD program, then a 3D, sending a file to 3d print, and then after they’ve done that, they can come back, walk in and say, okay, today I want to do this because I know I can do it on that machine or using this tool or that technique. So I think that’s the rationale behind the structure that I think is needed in a maker space as it relates to curriculum and skills.

Matthew Worwood [00:25:37]:
And I think just to tie it also back to the story that, the wonderful story you shared about the students at the ranch learning to code and then going back and using Duolingo, there is this opportunity to apply your knowledge, to make connections between what you’re being told you have to learn, and then being able to have a space to which you understand why it’s important to learn it. Because now that knowledge has value, you need it. You need to apply it in order to solve a problem. And I think quite often in traditional education, when we’re kind of like constructing knowledge from the curriculum and we know to the ways in which we are then kind of like tested on that knowledge, it’s not always applicational. And I think that the maker space piece, and obviously, as you kind of progress into higher education, perhaps you start getting into why internships are important or independent studies are important. But I think children of all ages need that opportunity to apply knowledge in the process of creating and making and problem solving. And I think anyone who’s listening and trying to work out why maker spaces are so important, I think that in some ways, is a significant part of the benefit to maker spaces in any community, formal or informal learning environments.

Michael Mino [00:26:55]:
Right. And the thing we’re talking about, digital electronics, digital technologies, again. So here’s a case where the work that we’re doing, coding and digital electronics, led to them using another digital tool, the iPads, to use Duolingo. So that’s a good thing, right? We’re not going to say you shouldn’t use an iPad to learn English. Right? We’d never say that because here it was. It was motivating them. In a lot of cases, kids are more motivated to use a computer or a mobile device to learn something, or they’re more motivated to learn something when they can use a mobile device or a digital technology to do that learning. So I think it’s important that integration of the two and not a separation.

Michael Mino [00:27:40]:
The other piece is, I want to say I’m working in this area of STEM making and digital technologies since, really my first communications lab I had in 1987 in a school, we had an Apple laser printer and I think three or four Apple Macs. No one else had that. We had this thing called computer Eyes, which was like the first camera for a computer, where we’d stand in front of the camera and it would reprint us, create a photo by printing line by line, to create a photo. Right. So that’s going back, I hate to say it, over 30 years, and all the while, there’s been this hand wringing about the lack of diversity, the lack of opportunity for minority and underrepresented students, for underrepresented genders in all of these fields of STEM and technology. And it’s still being said today, no different than it was 30 years ago. We’re just completely failed at trying to recruit or trying to interest students in pursuing these careers in STEM. And I think that’s where the maker space can be something, have a significant impact because nothing else has worked.

Michael Mino [00:29:03]:
Okay. Yes, there are some very good STEM schools. No question about it. There are some very good magnet charter schools that have embraced STEM and created new models for STEM learning. I mean, you have. I heard your episode with one of the teachers who was from high tech high, a really excellent example, a great STEM school, but that’s the minority. That’s the exception. That’s not the rule.

Michael Mino [00:29:25]:
And I think maker spaces can become more of the rule, more of a majority opportunity to introduce these new technologies, like the example I gave where a high school senior had never had an experience with digital technology. So how is that student even going to know there’s a whole career opportunity in digital technologies, whether it’s robotics or electronics or you do a search on, indeed, you’ll find numerous positions in those fields. Student had no experience in that. How is he supposed to know that’s a career opportunity? And it wasn’t being taught, obviously, in his science or math class. So I think the makerspace can become a real center for kind of opening up the world of high tech and STEM to students other than their traditional classrooms, the traditional academic subject areas.

Cyndi Burnett [00:30:15]:
Well, Michael, we’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Unfortunately, we’re running out of time, so we want to make sure we hit our final question that we ask all of our interviewees. So what three things would you recommend to our educators, listening or parents to help them bring creativity into their classroom or homes?

Michael Mino [00:30:34]:
Yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and given my experience with maker spaces with budgets and programs, I’ve created maker spaces with a budget of $20,000. And I’ve created maker spaces, helped create maker spaces with a budget of $300,000. But even if I had $500, I could create a space. All right. And I think you did reference somebody who was talking about the environment and the work in Africa around the environment of learning. And actually, it’s the Italians who, some have come up with this idea that the environment is the third teacher. Right. So the environment as the third teacher.

Michael Mino [00:31:16]:
Well, you can create a maker environment, whether it’s a corner of your room, a table, even a desk, literally, for using no budget. Right. Just found materials, scavenged materials, recycled materials, found tools. I mean, you can get very inexpensive tools, non dangerous tools, but very inexpensive. So I would say work with what you have, number one, in terms of the budget. Right. Work with the budget you have if you’re lucky enough, if you’re fortunate enough, if you’re endowed enough to have a $300,000 budget, then obviously you’re going to have an incredible maker space. But if all you have is $500 and I raised maybe $3,000 on gofundme for my space in Mexico when I first started, you work with that, you can buy a $200.03 d printer versus a $2,000.03 d printer.

Michael Mino [00:32:10]:
Now, yes, the $2,000.03 d printer is awful nice, but the $200 printer can print just as well. So work with the budget you have is number one, whatever that budget may be. And don’t underestimate the possibility of building a budget and reaching out to parents or organizations. I referenced that first communications lab. I did back in the got a $10,000 grant from a local company that no one in the school knew, had a philanthropy arm that funded projects like that in the community, and I just reached out to them and ended up with $10,000. So work with what you have in terms of budget. Work with the space you have. If you’re fortunate enough to have, again, a dedicated space that you can use and convert or build into a maker space like we did in Mexico.

Michael Mino [00:33:07]:
Originally, my space in Mexico was not a dedicated space. I just started using, like, a common area, and we just started doing robot activities and whatever we could safely do within that space. We now have a dedicated space because it was obvious we needed a space that we could grow into and do more with. So we got a dedicated space. But if all you have is a corner of the room, elementary teachers are very familiar with creating centers of learning, centers of learning for different types of activities, different type of experiences. You can create a maker center. The maker movement is very diverse. I mean, there are maker spaces within libraries.

Michael Mino [00:33:48]:
There are maker spaces within technical programs in the, quote, tech wing of the school, where there might be fully equipped shops and opportunity to have a very robust maker space like that. But again, it could also be a desk. And then the other thing finally kind of around curriculum is start where you are. And this is something that I’ve used that kind of concept a lot in some of the work I’ve done, especially in elementary schools, like, how do we get teachers to integrate making into the curriculum? So my first question would always be, what type of project are you doing now? Do you have a project do you do with students now that could incorporate more making opportunities? So maybe they’re not making a physical prototype of some sort or physical object or artifact, but they could if you incorporated and given the opportunity of some other additional resources. And so that’s where I said, like, okay, let’s start with where you are. And we’re not introducing a new domain. We’re not trying to force you to introduce a new curriculum, but look at the curriculum you have and how you can incorporate it. And I think those three things working like that, I mean, recently, another elementary school, k eight school that I’ve worked with, we took a science room.

Michael Mino [00:35:08]:
It was a stem room that was way overcrowded, very unappealing space, very not functional, really functioning even as it was intended to. And we turned it into a maker space that has become, like, the center of vibrant learning in the school. It’s really just ignited so much interest and so much excitement in the kids. So all those things, I think anyone can incorporate making wherever they are, and the same would go for an informal environment, looking at your spaces, looking at your budgets, looking at your opportunities that you have currently and how you can start to integrate.

Matthew Worwood [00:35:46]:
So, Michael, thank you so much for sharing all of your insights on the maker movement and to you listening. If you’ve enjoyed this show and you think that there’s a lot of information that you can potentially give to a member of your school community, perhaps a teacher that is in charge of the maker space, or perhaps your school is looking to create a maker space, we ask you to simply forward a link to this episode to that individual. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:36:09]:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was sponsored by creativity and vacation and dadsforcreativity.com. Close.