Makerlab Integration into High School Curriculums
The South Metropolitan Higher Education Consortium (SMHEC) is a partnerships of 13 universities (including IIT) and community colleges in the Chicago Southland. SMHEC has been in the process of creating the SouthWORKS MakerLab Network, with 11 of the schools pledging to put a MakerLab on their campus very soon. As an undergraduate student at the Illinois Institute of Technology I was part of the interdisciplinary team tasked with the challenge to develop a list of potential student projects that would utilize concepts within NGSS and sketched out a workshop we could deliver to familiarize middle and high school faculty with the tools in a MakerLab and demonstrate the teaching benefits of using the MakerLab. Our team created a workshop to train high school teachers to be ready to implement a set of fully developed learning modules at their own schools utilizing a MakerLab – including student and teacher instructions, identify NGSS concepts covered, equipment, supplies, etc.
Upon completion of the workshop design I was able to facilitate the first training with a small group of local high school teachers at the newly established Park Forest Maker Space as part of the SHMEC MakerLab network. The workshop was broken into two different sections to focus on 3D printing and laser cutting. Below you can see slide decks used during the training and photos of the training.
An outline of the workshop as it was delivered to the high school teachers is seen here
Workshop Outline