Hearing the voices of young makers: a Make-to-Learn symposium session

For educators, the opportunities to see the world from the vantage point of the youth with whom we work are as important as they are rare, so the symposium with young makers captured in this video is especially precious.

John Dewey, in the Child and the Curriculum, talked about curriculum as traversing between the logical and the psychological.  The logical, the arrangement of knowledge in the disciplines for example, is what we often think of in crafting a curricular path. Understanding the psychological, the way the mind of the student apprehends and makes sense of something at different developmental points, is key to teaching and mentoring. Thinking about the twin poles of the logical and the psychology is key to great curriculum.

Make to Learn, a project at the Creativity Labs at the University of Indiana, takes up the challenge of curriculum by seeking to understand the relationship between making and learning. (The team at Make to Learn believes there is one, by the way, but we’re not sure we understand it well enough to walk between the logical and the psychological just yet.) As part of this effort, the team behind the project sponsored a symposium day at the front of the Digital Media and Learning Conference in March 2013.  We held a challenge at Instructables to encourage young makers to tell us what they make and what they think they learned. And we also invited some youth to come talk to researchers at the conference about their work. You can see that session on video right here.