Our first ever maker faire was June 3rd.  I will be presenting our lessons learned with our Librarian, Mary Pellicano, at the LCPS ActivLoudounPlus Conference next week.  I thought I'd provide my overall impression of how it went and a synopsis of our process so teachers don't have to take notes on what resources we used to get started.  Hopefully what we did will help you in your planning.

We were concurrently inspired by recent articles and news broadcasts of maker spaces in education. Particularly this blog from Worlds of Learning and the CBS news broadcast about New Milford High School in NJ created by Laura Fleming (Tabletop Inventing Podcast #020) her book Worlds of Making: Best Practices for Establishing a Makerspace for Your School (Corwin Connected Educators Series). Then there were all the Twitter posts we kept seeing #makerspace.

A surprise came in the form of a 3D printer our Tuscarora Principal @principal021 was so generous to purchase for our tech. ed. classes. The 3D printer use in education also intrigued me as I'd had a one-on-one show and tell with the #MSFTEDU folks at the Tyson's (Virginia) Microsoft store. They've provided some just-in-time training for a few of our tech leaders and our principal when we launched Office 365 in our school, along with BYOT.

We also visited the Gum Spring Library @LoudounLibrary Maker space with our Leadership class.  They have a finch robot that can be programmed with Scratch, and Spheros that can be controlled with a cell phone app as well as MakeyMakey.com kits and more.  Schools can come there on field trips to experience the maker space.

So my librarian and I began discussing if we could actually have a maker space in our school.  We talked about what we'd read and saw first hand.  What interested us, and what might interest our students. We read more and participated in a webinar led by Laura Fleming. We liked the UTec Maker Model as a means of visualizing and forming our best practices for this endeavor.

We came back together and talked about what we had on hand and what we needed to purchase, given our $500 budget. We talked to students casually about what they might like to tinker with in a maker space. We even observed that the board games the librarian had introduced were being used quite often before and after school and during lunch.

We then discussed how the new computers (laptops instead of desktops) we are getting next year will impact the current function of the library and the classrooms as well as students and teachers.  It's a big shift going totally mobile and requires lots of planning and input from stakeholders.  We wondered how a maker space could support BYOT and our mobile learning program in general.

What we came up with was a hands-on center based one day event where teachers could bring their classes to experience a maker faire.  Mary called it a "soft opening."   We wanted it to be a success and this was our way of dipping our toe into maker spaces. We thought this would be a good way to see one in action without making a permanent maker space yet. In addition to the Gum Spring Library Makerspace staff demonstrating the 3D printer, the spheros, Makey Makey, and the finch, we ended up with the following stations:

• Makey Makey
• Squishy Circuits
• Legos (I have a lot of them)
• K'NEX educational building sets
• Zentangle
• Oragami folding (Crane folding)
• Guiness Book Paper Airplane competition
• Puzzles
• Math Magic card games and problem solving
• Magnetic Poetry
• Digital Book Trailers
• Making Dreamcatchers (a symbol of our school's heritage)

We also secured 1 parent volunteer and two librarians, in addition to the maker space staff to come help. We emailed teachers a couple times and ended up booked with two to three classes for 45 minutes of each 90 minute block.  A few happy anecdotes:

• One student connected the MakeyMakey kit within 15 minutes without assistance and played the piano on the computer (will post the video in my next post).
• Squishy Circuits was too messy without a dedicated volunteers running it.
• LOTS of students loved the legos and K'Nex (building with their hands).
• The public library staff visiting were a big hit with more hands on tech.
• Many students enjoyed the more crafty centers.
• One student commented they wanted more competition type centers. ;-)

We, including staff and students, felt it was a great success.  Kids liked it, teachers liked it, and We were TIRED! Build in breaks for the adults was one of our other lessons learned.  We performed an exit survey to gain more than verbal feedback from students and teachers, so we set up kiosk workstations where they could complete the survey prior to leaving (more on that and lessons learned in my next post).  With approximately 400 visitors that day, we received 64 surveys completed.  We were happy with the positive feedback and suggestions. We also gleaned lots of information to begin planning our maker space for next year.

Lastly, we talked afterward in our debrief if we wanted to continue having maker faires or have a permanent maker space or both.  We will have to update you on how it evolves next year.