How the Maker Movement is moving into the classroom (Edutopia)

Vicki Davis wrote a nice introduction to the Maker Movement in classrooms for the Edutopia blog.  How the Maker Movement is moving into the classroom.

“The Maker movement is a unique combination of artistry, circuitry, and old-fashioned craftsmanship. Certainly, learning by doing or “making” has been happening since our ancestors refined the wheel.

Don’t treat making as a sidebar to an already overtaxed curriculum. As you investigate the principles behind teaching STEAM via making, you’ll see sound research from many educators throughout history, including Jean Piaget who, in 1973, wrote:

[S]tudents who are thus reputedly poor in mathematics show an entirely different attitude when the problem comes from a concrete situation and is related to other interests.

In 1972, Seymour Papert predicted what many complain is the state of today’s apps and programs for modern students:

[T]he same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased toward its dumbest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which measurable results can be obtained by treating the children like pigeons in a Skinner box.

Indeed, many of us go on first our first techno-rush as kids playing with erector sets, Legos, and the Radio Shack electronic kits. In a day when everyone thinks, “There’s an app for that,” many educators believe that we’re missing the point of technology if we think its best use is programming kids to memorize math facts. Students don’t want to use apps — they want to make them.”

Read the rest! How the Maker Movement is moving into the classroom.