tinkering with teachers

Yesterday I attended a MEMSET (Massachusetts Elementary and Middle School Educational Technologists) meeting at the Kingsley Montessori School in downtown Boston for two hours of "tinkering" along with other BB&N educators Jennifer Levenberg, Carol Fine, and Svetlana Grinshpan and my daughter Hannah.  We all used conductive copper foil tape to make a simple circuit with a battery holder which lit an LED following a video tutorial by Jie Qi from the High-Low Tech MIT Media Lab using a template.  We also discussed the possibility of arduino in the classroom by exploring the SparkFun inventors kit with a peer from the Pike School and looked at Makey-Makeys and how they interact with the Scratch programming environment with educators from the Chestnut Hill School.  If you are interested in exploring tinkering in the classroom, BB&N has Makey-Makeys, pico boards, arduino kits, and raspberry pis to play with.  We also have several books in our library if you would like to read up on engineering and programming.  Below are a few of our titles:

• Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager, Ph.D.
• Super Scratch Programming Adventure by the L.E.A.D project
• Getting Started with Raspberry Pi by Matt Richardson and Shawn Wallace
• Sew Electric: a Collection of DIY Projects that Combine Fabric, Electronics, and Programming by Leah Buechley and Kanjun Qiu
• Encyclopedia of Electronic Components by Charles Platt
• Learn to Program with Scratch by Majed Marji
• and lots of books on programming with LOGO

Talk to an ATS if you are interested!