Last month Mimi and I (Ronni) attended Play Make Learn (PML) in Madison, Wisconsin from July 17th-19th. Play Make Learn is an annual conference around the “design, research and practice of playful learning, games for learning and positive social impact, making and makerspaces, STEAM education, and arts in education. PML creates an inspirational space for preK-12 educators, designers, developers, innovators, librarians, museum professionals, makers, and researchers to tinker together, share knowledge, and celebrate one another’s work.”
Pre-Conference Workshop
On Wednesday, we facilitated a half-day pre-conference workshop titled “Tinker with Code, Cardboard, and Craft Materials: Playful Approaches to Engaging Youth and Families.” We were excited to have around eighteen participants with a range of roles including makerspace educators, teachers, librarians, museum educators and university professors. During this workshop, we divided our time between inviting participants to experience computational tinkering activities as learners, reflecting on the activities and their facilitation, and sharing resources from the broader Facilitating Computational Tinkering project.
Pre-Conference Workshop: Tinker with a View
The first activity we shared was an adaptation of Tinker with a View where participants are invited to create a window into their world using Octostudio as well as physical craft materials to create frames. You can learn more about the design of this activity in our facilitation guide. We were excited to see how quickly our participants started to connect this idea to their own classrooms, makerspaces, and libraries and imagine together other Octostudio project ideas. We wish we had more time to make together and share everyone’s projects but it was a great start!
Pre-Conference Workshop: Facilitation Dialogue Cards
Next, we shared a resource that is still under development called Facilitation Dialogue Cards and their accompanying guide. These cards share more detail about the values and practices that go into how we design learning experiences for young people where they feel safe, seen, empowered and see themselves as creators. The facilitation cards fall within seven categories: getting ready, welcoming, inspiring, creating, sharing, reflecting and reflecting to relaunch. During this time, we also invited participants to create their own facilitation card with a practice that they find essential in creating equity-oriented learning environments in their own work so we can learn from each other’s expertise. We’re excited to share this resource on our FCT website soon and hear how educators are taking it up!
Pre-Conference Workshop: Tinker with a Book
After a quick break, we dove back into making together and shared an exploration area called “Tinker with a Book” where we invited participants to create Octostudio projects inspired by a favorite book. To jump start this activity, we read “Inside Cat” together, a picture book that our team particularly likes because of its whimsical illustration style and its connection to the previous activity “tinker with a view” as it tells the story of a cat peering outside of windows of many shapes and sizes. Participants were invited to create projects inspired by this story or another book that came to mind. We also brought other books that we like for this activity that feature interesting shapes, patterns, and characters to bring to life with code. You can learn more about this emerging exploration area here. We’re excited about this prompt because of its ability to promote multiple types of literacy development including language, computational and material literacies.
Pre-Conference Workshop: “Now What” Zine
For our final activity, we shared another new resource that is under development called the “Now What” zine. Inspired by our previous zine that aims to support educators in developing their thinking around what equity means to them and in their work, this zine aims to support educators to think concretely about next steps when adapting and implementing a learning innovation. Through this zine, we hope that participants see the supports, or infrastructures, around them in new ways and recognize where they have agency and community in creating lasting change. We share stories from our work with educators as they have brought computational tinkering into their spaces and we scaffold conversations about creating goals and identifying next steps. We’re really excited to share this resource and its accompanying facilitation guide soon!
Equity Zine Session
On Friday, our team facilitated an Equity Zine session. We have been developing our “What Equity Means to Me” zine for over two years and we still learn so much from being able to facilitate these sessions with new educators. We’re particularly excited to hear that participants are interested in remixing the zine for their own purposes including using it with teen museum facilitators. You can learn more about one of our previous zine sessions at the Computer Clubhouse Conference in 2022 as well as a blog post about the creation of this zine.
Although other members of our Creative Communities team have participated in PML in the past, this was my and Mimi’s first time attending. We loved spending time at the University of Wisconsin campus near the lake, visiting the amazing Children’s Museum, reconnecting with old colleagues, and meeting potential collaborators and eating cheese curds. We learn so much when we are able to spend time with practitioners and look forward to iterating on our resources based on everyone’s generous feedback.
These materials are based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (2005764, 1908351).