This title has been inspired from Vipul Redey’s TEDx talk which is apt and relevant to our Makerspace at Inventure Academy. It is when a school begins to think of teaching and learning beyond a classroom that a student evolves into a learner. The difference is, that a student traditionally awaits an instruction while a learner proactively seeks new and deep learning by themselves.
What is a Makerspace?
A Makerspace is a place in which people with shared creative interests can gather to work on projects, tinker with materials and technologies while collaborating on ideas, sharing equipment and knowledge, all the while learning from the process of making and creating.
Why does Inventure Academy have a Makerspace?
Makerspaces have now become a global phenomenon where people of any age, any background of education and any economic class can come together to collaborate and innovate. This helps build in any child an ability to express themselves in several different ways but most importantly in a way that grants them a personal sense of confidence.
When Inventure Academy first decided to have a makerspace, it was to provide and allow for our learners the ability to seek, explore, mix, build, dismantle and express their thoughts and feelings into a tangible form of creation. Every learner gets the freedom to choose and voice their creativity while learning to pay attention to every part of the process as much as the conclusion. During that process of building relationships with their ideas, materials and tools, our learners slowly refine their skills to make themselves think critically, become more aware of their environment and remain intrinsically motivated to continuously pursue the art of making. This is the essence of our makerspace.
Dr. Jean Piaget, the renowned psychologist and educationist said it well that ‘We learn best by doing’ and taking from that, Seymour Papert, mathematician and educationist added that ‘We build on our existing knowledge to construct new knowledge for ourselves’. Our Makerspace approach compels our learners to use their own cognitive faculties to ‘figure out’ what they are learning. Unlike traditional methods, the end goal is vaguely defined and the steps to get there are created by the learners themselves, wherein the faculty act as guides or mentors and often become the learners themselves.
Advantages of a Makerspace
An added advantage of our learners spending more time at the Makerspace is that they don’t necessarily have to approach their learning by separating it into distinct subjects, instead they become more cognisant of how different concepts share a common ground across several subjects, thereby encouraging integration of thinking and problem solving.
Learners come in all types and shapes and to accommodate this high diversity, our curriculum is designed to enable each one of them through both a structured and unstructured approach. The more differentiated the approach the more enabled a child feels, which in turn tends to create a mindset of expansion.
How the Makerspace works at Inventure
While ensuring that every child has all the support they require through their journey of exploration and creation, our Makerspace pays close attention to our learners’ awareness of personal expectations. On one hand there are essential hard and soft skills they need to acquire during the school years, while on the other hand they also need to be realistic with themselves since growth is gradual. They are encouraged to imagine in a grandiose manner while setting milestones to be achieved along a stipulated timeline.
Conclusion
My personal opinion is that all teaching and learning should adopt a Makerspace style, making it the central method of education and not the exception. What is highly commendable about a Makerspace approach is that it cuts across age groups ensuring that even adults, who our children spend a large amount of time with, can also continue to be curious about the world they inhabit. Our minds inherently seek and that is questionably the same reason we are at the top of the food chain, so if we can continue to encourage that ability there is a high likelihood we will also continue to analyse, problem solve, innovate, create and celebrate for the rest of our lives.
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Aaron Joseph heads Inventure Academys’ Makerspace and is also an educator for Design and technology with Senior School. He comes with a background in the sciences, art and design, is a keen enthusiast of nature and enjoys spending time with his pets.
