HAGERSVILLE—The Hagersville Lions were on hand recently at Hagersville Elementary School (HES) to present a cheque for $2,000 toward the school’s new ‘Maker Spaces’ program.
HES Principal Shannon Love described the new project as an opportunity to explore curiosity and imagination: “It’s a playful atmosphere where learning unfolds, and you’re making rather than consuming. Often in the class we’re consuming information. This space is all about creating things that are tangible.”
Love called innovation the thinking of the future.
“Critical thinking, innovation, collaboration. By providing students with the opportunity to foster that type of thinking, we’re doing a much better job of engaging them in the learning process, because they’re very active in the learning, and also in fostering those skills,” she explained. “We’re not cookie cutters on assembly lines.”
The Maker Space, which Love ultimately envisions as a large maker’s cart full of tools and items that will help students envision and create a variety of items, is based on a three-tier structure: high tech, crafting, and low tech.
For high tech, students would have access to a variety of fun computer coding kits, including Ozobots, Microbits, Cubelets, Makey Makey, and 10 iPads, which will allow them to utilize concepts learned in math and apply them in a setting that produces tangible results.
Love explained, “Those are things that will allow students to start to scaffold learning in terms of coding. Now coding is part of our math curriculum, so students as early as Grade 1 are starting to do early coding through things like arrows and directions, and they can then use some of these kits as they get older to learn how, through coding, they can control things.”
Love also noted that while the school has a green screen available in their library, they don’t currently have the technology needed to utilize it properly. That would be also a proposed feature for the Maker Space.
On crafting, Love explained how the Maker Space will provide ample tools and items to help foster any creative crafting idea a student might have: “Things like paper presses, a button-making machine, laminators, and those types of things, giving kids another way to build and create.”
The third element, low tech, will provide students with a series of hand tools to help facilitate any building or creative project ideas a student might want to try putting together. Items under consideration for the project would include starter tool kits, tools for constructing with cardboard, and safety equipment.
While the space is designed to be portable using a cart, it’s main hub will be the school’s library.
“Libraries are turning into these types of learning commons,” explained Love. “In the past, the library had information and we used it; now it becomes much more of a learning platform, where we’re also gathering information, but using that information to create new things. Our libraries are really moving towards more of an interactive place, rather than a place to sit quietly and read, like we would have seen when we were kids.”
The Lion’s donation will go toward purchasing some of the needed materials to bring the space to life, but Love said the school continues to seek ways to raise more funding for the project, adding, “We’re continuing to look at grants, donations, as well as fundraising on the school’s behalf to be able to continue to build up this Maker Space project.”
She thanked the club for their continued commitment to local youth: “We really appreciate their support. They’re supporting the needs of our students and the innovative learning that takes place here…. Whether it’s high tech, crafting, or low tech … whether it’s science, English, social studies, or math, this is a way to take those lessons about concepts and really allow students to play with them and create things with them.”
Love concluded, “The jobs of today will be different from the jobs of tomorrow. By preparing students to think innovatively and creatively they will be well prepared for that.”
