Think back to high school. What if your teacher had told you to throw out the curriculum and run the class yourself?
What would you have done? Would you extend recess by several periods? Would you turn the class into Watching “Real Housewives of Atlanta” 101?
Or would you pull yourselves together, get creative, and make something incredible like, say, a piano powered by celery and old bananas?
If your answer is the latter, you’d probably love Makerspace in Phoenix.
“Makerspace is a place for students to make,” says Amber Henry, a Makerspace teacher and coordinator. “It’s for them to do what they’re passionate about. They get to take an idea that’s in their head and make it a physical reality.”
Students decide what they want to make and are guided by experts into making it real.
Everything from computer games to rudimentary electronics to art projects to a piano powered by celery and bananas is brought to life by the students of Makerspace, and the lessons are self-evident.
“When we tell students that there’s math in this room, and there’s science in this room, and there’s English in this room, they see the collaboration,” Henry says. “They see the connection.”
More than just a lawless play-space, Makerspace lets students take control of their own learning in a really unique way.
Everyone struggles occasionally with the traditional class structure, and sometimes, reading textbooks and staring at PowerPoint presentations isn’t the best way to learn.
“A lot of kids tend to think that high school is boring,” says Hayden Araza, a Makerspace student, “because they’re not given the opportunity to say what they want to do. … We’re gonna make our own rubric. We don’t need one of yours.”
