Our Makerspace team is growing, Now what?

Step 2 - Build a Vision

I didn't know where we were headed when we decided to pursue the Makerspace. While watching others share their interesting and inspiring stories through Twitter, online articles and beyond, it became clear there was no one way to go about setting up a Makerspace. What did we want to create?

Our primary objective is to build a space where students of all ages can feel safe taking chances to design, build, and create for the world we live in. Our computer science program has been growing strong over the past few years, and more and more students seem to be branching off into the land of Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's. Starting with these areas as foundational components of the 'what', we needed to answer a few other important questions.


Who?
We reached out to the principals of most schools in our district to see if we could build something that their schools could take advantage of. This also helped us kick off the process of building our team. As the team grew, we better understood who we could best build for. We settled on starting with a grade 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12 model that matched three of our schools. We also put in place a long-term vision that will allow us to include members of the community beyond the schools by creating workshops and open Makerspace opportunities.

Where?
We really considered what spaces around the district made sense. While we were located in the high school, our potential audience was located everywhere. We scouted a few potential spaces in the schools and even considered some spaces in town that were not school based. In the end, we had a great space available at the high school, and decided to build around that concept. We are also fortunate enough to have a recently built STEAM Lab at the middle school, in essence allowing for us to create a new second STEAM Lab in our new Makerspace. We did a mock up of our two room layout so we could share this vision with others.

Layout of our 2-room space. Images are examples of what we hope to create in the near future.

When?

With no funding in place, it was clear we would be going no place fast. So the when had to involve some creativity and enthusiasm. We found that in the form of a group of high school students ready to do good today. Reaching out to our Robotics Club and beyond, we found a group of dedicated students who wanted to get moving right away. With their enthusiasm, we immediately began applying for local grants that could give us the boost we needed to get started. With a little money and our new team of Mobilespace Mentors ready to go, we decided that even without a space, we could immediately launch a Mobile Makerspace program. This took some planning, training, and purchasing, and gave us a way to see what we could do without waiting for everything to be in place. (More on this program in upcoming posts).

The next piece of 'When?' would come when we had secured more funding. We are currently looking at having a space up and running by the beginning of next year. It will be far from complete, and at the same time, will be light years from where we are now.

The questions haven't ended and the journey has just begun. Please feel free to send us your inspirations and your questions. I can be reached on Twitter @ahstechteacher or by email cmcgowan@ashland.k12.ma.us.