Our school’s technology strategic planning committee realizes that a makerspace will help achieve our goal of preparing our students for the unknown future. We want to use the makerspace to give students the tools they need to solve real-world problems and affect change in the world. We would also like to provide them with access to more technology than they have at the school now.
We have investigated different ways of doing this but have not found an optimal solution. Creating a high-quality space could be expensive. We would need to prepare a room and possibly buy expensive equipment. We do not have a lot of experience or expertise with digital fabrication, so we are not even sure which equipment we want to purchase yet. We don’t have a solid sense of what kinds of projects we could be doing that will make a positive change in the world.
To solve this problem, we found an organization not far from our school that does have the experience we lack. They have an excellent lab and the expertise to know the potential of the equipment. They have good connections with local organizations that are working to make positive changes. Their philosophy closely matches that our own and they are interested in having our students come to the lab for classes.
We found however, that the cost will be well above what we can afford. We may be able to get enough money for one year of classes, but it is not sustainable. A small group of students might get an excellent experience, but then we would not have enough funding for following groups.
For the amount one year of classes would cost we could fund a nice makerspace in our own school but we don’t yet have the expertise and connections we need to make the space successful. We can’t move forward with a plan of this magnitude if we don’t have a solid plan of what we are going to do with it yet.
Brian Durst EdTech 