Maker Education: The STEAM Playground

The Promise of the Maker Movement for Education

The Maker Movement is a community of hobbyists, tinkerers, engineers, hackers, and artists who creatively design and build projects for both playful and useful ends. There is growing interest among educators in bringing making into K-12 education to enhance opportunities to engage in the practices of engineering, specifically, and STEM more broadly. This article describes three elements of the ...

Rethinking STEM Education: An Interdisciplinary STEAM Curriculum

The State University of New York at Potsdam, with support from Lockheed Martin, has developed a multidisciplinary program intended to foster creative thinking by combining studies in the arts, humanities, and STEM fields. The College has a long tradition of innovative education in the arts, natural and social sciences, computer science, and mathematics. Thi E approach will support the developme...

Order in the playground

In eukaryotes the arrangement of genes along the chromosome is not as random as it at first appeared, and distinctive clusters of functionally related but non-homologous genes can be found in the genomes of certain animals and fungi. These include the major histocompatibility complex in mammals and gene clusters for nutrient use and secondary metabolite production in fungi. A growing number of ...

The Maker Fables

This Science Fiction Prototype explores the idea that the current interest in maker space activities could continue to grow to the point where it causes a sea change in the manufacturing industry as it shifts from centralised production in factories, to a distributed production in people’s communities or homes. This move is a natural extension of a number of research trends, such as the increas...

The adaptive decision maker