Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Education Forum Introduction: Dale Dougherty”.
Good morning so good to see you all of you here, i’m i’m excited. This is really kind of a kickoff event for for maker faire. We did this last year and uh. I actually, you know believe that the most important thing that the maker movement is doing is inspiring and connecting uh teachers, parents and students to really not just make but understand the value of making and and really to transform the educational and learning experiences of all children. Um to make them active and engaged and and to do something that i think um can have a profound impact on our world and on the lives of of all the people that we connect. I think you’ll see if you come to maker faire a lot of people who have started making and have begun developing in really interesting ways, um so uh.
The other thing i wanted to kind of tell you about is uh this week. I i have my book out: it’s called free to make and um thank you, um, and i tried to capture a lot of the ideas behind the maker movement, the things that are both in my head and out in the world of stories of makers and uh. Certainly talk a lot about education, but not just schools, not just kids. This is something that i think is is in our community, it’s in our culture and how do we create a culture around learning and foster that sense and i think, there’s there’s kind of three things i want to point out. We cover i cover in the book. A little bit one one is that making is really grounded in play, and i don’t think we should forget that, as as we bring it into schools, i think it’s almost the most important thing to ask ourselves. Are we doing this in the spirit of play? You know this sense of immersion sense of freedom that you have in play to do things and explore and be curious, and another sense is to actually do things without a lot of judgment.
Keeping you from doing that, whether it’s self-censorship or other people saying you shouldn’t. Do that it’s it’s trying things out, you know we play music, we play sports and, i think making is a form of play which leads to me. My second thing, i think making is a practice. It is like yoga is a practice, but it’s also like sports or music. You get better at it by doing it and having more exposure to it, helps you develop. So if making a scene is just a little slice of someone’s life, a little tiny activity, they do once in a blue moon.
I don’t think it has much impact on them, but if they begin to develop that practice internally, it becomes meaningful to them. It becomes something they can apply to lots of different subject areas. Lots of different problem sets and different opportunities.
That may come their way so think about making. And how do you embed that as a practice that kids get a lot of experience doing and the third element um i’m keeping all p’s here? Participation? And i i think this is really what we have here in having a community and having the sense that you’re doing this with other people to participate, i think of maker faire as an element of participatory culture. It is really the content is co-created with all the makers here that that bring their work and share it and they’re participating in this event, and i believe even the people that come as guests are participating, they’re, active and engaged.
So some of the value of making is it allows you to participate in communities that might be creative or technical outside of school outside of even you know, the local community that you live in so play practice and participation. I’D like to kind of um embed that in in in you, as you think about how you uh work with with children, particularly. Lastly, i want to tell you a story that i covered a little bit in the book, but you know one of the reasons i’m so excited to be here with maker faire on at the new york hall of science. Is it it was where the world’s fair was held in 1964 and 1939, and and i’ve had a few people over the years come say. The last time i was here was with the world’s fair and i said: well, you could come back more often right. So um, but in in 1964 the science fiction writer isaac asimov.
I don’t know if you you know him, but he he wrote the three laws of robots and and all kinds of stories and things about the future. And he came to the world’s fair here and and um someone asked him to think about what would the world be like in 50 years from 1964, which would be about 2014. and, being you know, just a prescient fellow, he got a lot of things right. You know he said something like the world would have a lot of robots, most of them not very good um and he talked about autonomous cars. He talked about a lot of things that we look around either at maker faire in the world around us and we see them, but the one prediction he made that we didn’t get right and it’s not him. That’S at fault.
It’S us. He said that every student would learn computer science, he said you know this would be a normal subject in the life of that generation and – and so you know, uh, i think we have a a a lot to do to keep up with his vision of the Future but more importantly, today, we see making as part of that part of certainly including computing, but it’s much broader. But i think it’s the marriage in ways of technical and creative skills of digital and physical tools and processes that we’re able to create new things and, more importantly – and this is sort of what i want to emphasize back to the word participation – is – i really want Everybody to be engaged to participate in creating that future that there were visions, even at that world’s fair, that maybe a few companies would create that future or a few really smart people would create that future. But as steve jobs said, you know the world around.
You was created by people no smarter than you. I wish we could get that message to every kid, because, whatever their level, whatever their ability, they can participate meaningfully in creating that future. So, thank you very much and i hope you have a great day today and welcome to maker faire .