June 2nd, 2018
21st Century Classroom
Making, Sharing and Learning
By Erica Bertucci
Innovation Specialist St. Albans City School
ST. ALBANS – On Monday May 21st, three excited, nervous, St. Albans City School students headed to Champlain College to present at Dynamic Landscape, an education and innovation conference for all of Vermont. While the conference is for teachers, librarians, and technology staff, students are invited to present with their teachers when appropriate. The workshop these students helped to lead was called Makerspace and Entrepreneurship: a Perfect Partnership. Students Bella Swan, Judah Beauregard and George Remillard presented on the how they used the makerspace to support their businesses during the fall economics unit at St. Albans City School. The fall economics unit culminated with a school-wide mall where all communities sold the products they developed and marketed. While the students focused on the businesses they were a part of, all business products were displayed so participants in the workshop could see the diverse assortment.
When students arrived to present, they were brought into a college classroom that was already full with conference participants. They were a bit intimidated by the classroom set up and the packed audience but as soon a they started speaking they soon relaxed. As each student introduced themselves, George quickly decided they should all be professors as, after all, they were on a college campus, lecturing in a college classroom. His introduction as Professor George, got a laugh from the audience. With only 50 minutes to impart all their knowledge, the staff overseeing the presentation, Erica Bertucci and Grace Borst, quickly introduced the economics unit. Then students presented their stores and explained why they had chosen to create the products they sold. Judah and George discussed their community’s store: Save the Bay, and highlighted that they chose this project to raise awareness of all the garbage dumped in the bay. Bella discussed that the mission of the Service and Pride Inc. store was to honor the veterans and raise money for the Purple Hearts Reunited foundation. They donated 50% of their profits to this organization. They also created Flannel Friends, 4 dolls with different facial expressions, to give younger students a way to express their emotions.
Bella highlighted how communities use the makerspace to create customized, standardized, professional products. Then Judah talked about how their group went through the Design Thinking process to plan and create the commercial to market their store. The Design Thinking Process starts with Empathy, which in the students’ case was thinking about the message they want their commercial to portray and also thinking about their audience. From there the process goes on to Define and Ideate. Judah talked about creating a storyboard to get their ideas organized and also having a first meeting where all ideas were presented and talked about. After Ideate, there went to the next steps of Prototype and Test. This meant a lot of learning lines, doing many takes of each scene and presenting the progress to their peers and teachers.
After the students and teachers presented, time was left for the audience to ask questions Questions included wanting to see the projects up close, finding out how the students fit this into their schedule and wanting to know how much previous knowledge students had of the makerspace. Bella said how she had never used the laser cutter and didn’t really know what it could do but now she not only knows how to use it but also knows the software, which is the more challenging part. George discussed how he had always wanted to use the makerspace and while he knew a little, he didn’t know that he could draw a design and then cut it out of vinyl and heat press it onto fabric. George’s role in his community’s project was to create the logo and manage the process of getting it onto the bags which would hold their product. He talked about how he had to supervise other students to make sure they were preparing the vinyl correctly as he had been the one in his group who was taught how to do this by the makerspace staff.
The 50 minutes went by quickly and after taking a few deep breaths and enjoying sitting in the comfy chairs, the students moved on to experience the rest of the conference. They got to see the keynote speaker, a 5th grade student Curran Dee, who is the Chief Kid Officer (CKO) of DigCitKids, digital citizenship for kids by kids. Curran was very engaging and while Judah really enjoyed learning about the impact DigCitKids was having on communities around the world, he was also very happy to learn Ms. Borst wrote down Curran’s gaming ID so Judah could look him up later.
After the keynote speaker, it was time for lunch in the Champlain College cafeteria. Students may have been a bit overwhelmed at the amount of choice but quickly figured out they should just have more than one course and follow that up with some ice cream for dessert.
The students had more free time in the afternoon where they could learn from other students and teachers in the Innovation Showcase, along with seeing the cool products some of the vendors had on display. A definite favorite was the Virtual Reality booths. The students visited both a teacher in the Innovation Showcase demonstrating what his students had created and then they, of course, found the VR vendor who let them test the equipment!
While the students absorbed all that they could at the Innovation Showcase and vendor area, staff Erica Bertucci, Grace Borst and Ande Tagliamonte, ran two different tables as part of the Innovation Showcase. Grace and Erica presented about laser cutting, focusing around having elementary students turn their drawing into laser cut objects. Later on Ande demonstrated how to code stickers. This involved using a coding program called Beetleblocks to program a beetle to draw a picture. Then the picture is turned into an image and cut from the vinyl cutter. Ande focused on doing geometric designs and incorporated math content including complementary angles and why 360 is such an important number when coding shapes (whether a square or a hexagon). The Innovation Showcase was a favorite of all the teachers as they were able to talk with other educators about projects those educators had done and get advice on how to make it successful. One of the favorite project that Erica and Grace learned about and that is now available in St. Albans City School Makerspace is creating a hexaflexagon. By some tricky folding of a long skinny parallelogram, you can get a twodimensional hexagon that you can flip and reveal 3 different sides!
Overall everyone had a great day and were ready for naps at the end of it (well, at least the staff were ready for naps!). It was such a pleasure for the staff to see the students shine and also to see them take advantage of being on a college campus for the day.
Making, Sharing and Learning
By Erica Bertucci
Innovation Specialist St. Albans City School
ST. ALBANS – On Monday May 21st, three excited, nervous, St. Albans City School students headed to Champlain College to present at Dynamic Landscape, an education and innovation conference for all of Vermont. While the conference is for teachers, librarians, and technology staff, students are invited to present with their teachers when appropriate. The workshop these students helped to lead was called Makerspace and Entrepreneurship: a Perfect Partnership. Students Bella Swan, Judah Beauregard and George Remillard presented on the how they used the makerspace to support their businesses during the fall economics unit at St. Albans City School. The fall economics unit culminated with a school-wide mall where all communities sold the products they developed and marketed. While the students focused on the businesses they were a part of, all business products were displayed so participants in the workshop could see the diverse assortment.
When students arrived to present, they were brought into a college classroom that was already full with conference participants. They were a bit intimidated by the classroom set up and the packed audience but as soon a they started speaking they soon relaxed. As each student introduced themselves, George quickly decided they should all be professors as, after all, they were on a college campus, lecturing in a college classroom. His introduction as Professor George, got a laugh from the audience. With only 50 minutes to impart all their knowledge, the staff overseeing the presentation, Erica Bertucci and Grace Borst, quickly introduced the economics unit. Then students presented their stores and explained why they had chosen to create the products they sold. Judah and George discussed their community’s store: Save the Bay, and highlighted that they chose this project to raise awareness of all the garbage dumped in the bay. Bella discussed that the mission of the Service and Pride Inc. store was to honor the veterans and raise money for the Purple Hearts Reunited foundation. They donated 50% of their profits to this organization. They also created Flannel Friends, 4 dolls with different facial expressions, to give younger students a way to express their emotions.
Bella highlighted how communities use the makerspace to create customized, standardized, professional products. Then Judah talked about how their group went through the Design Thinking process to plan and create the commercial to market their store. The Design Thinking Process starts with Empathy, which in the students’ case was thinking about the message they want their commercial to portray and also thinking about their audience. From there the process goes on to Define and Ideate. Judah talked about creating a storyboard to get their ideas organized and also having a first meeting where all ideas were presented and talked about. After Ideate, there went to the next steps of Prototype and Test. This meant a lot of learning lines, doing many takes of each scene and presenting the progress to their peers and teachers.
After the students and teachers presented, time was left for the audience to ask questions Questions included wanting to see the projects up close, finding out how the students fit this into their schedule and wanting to know how much previous knowledge students had of the makerspace. Bella said how she had never used the laser cutter and didn’t really know what it could do but now she not only knows how to use it but also knows the software, which is the more challenging part. George discussed how he had always wanted to use the makerspace and while he knew a little, he didn’t know that he could draw a design and then cut it out of vinyl and heat press it onto fabric. George’s role in his community’s project was to create the logo and manage the process of getting it onto the bags which would hold their product. He talked about how he had to supervise other students to make sure they were preparing the vinyl correctly as he had been the one in his group who was taught how to do this by the makerspace staff.
The 50 minutes went by quickly and after taking a few deep breaths and enjoying sitting in the comfy chairs, the students moved on to experience the rest of the conference. They got to see the keynote speaker, a 5th grade student Curran Dee, who is the Chief Kid Officer (CKO) of DigCitKids, digital citizenship for kids by kids. Curran was very engaging and while Judah really enjoyed learning about the impact DigCitKids was having on communities around the world, he was also very happy to learn Ms. Borst wrote down Curran’s gaming ID so Judah could look him up later.
After the keynote speaker, it was time for lunch in the Champlain College cafeteria. Students may have been a bit overwhelmed at the amount of choice but quickly figured out they should just have more than one course and follow that up with some ice cream for dessert.
The students had more free time in the afternoon where they could learn from other students and teachers in the Innovation Showcase, along with seeing the cool products some of the vendors had on display. A definite favorite was the Virtual Reality booths. The students visited both a teacher in the Innovation Showcase demonstrating what his students had created and then they, of course, found the VR vendor who let them test the equipment!
While the students absorbed all that they could at the Innovation Showcase and vendor area, staff Erica Bertucci, Grace Borst and Ande Tagliamonte, ran two different tables as part of the Innovation Showcase. Grace and Erica presented about laser cutting, focusing around having elementary students turn their drawing into laser cut objects. Later on Ande demonstrated how to code stickers. This involved using a coding program called Beetleblocks to program a beetle to draw a picture. Then the picture is turned into an image and cut from the vinyl cutter. Ande focused on doing geometric designs and incorporated math content including complementary angles and why 360 is such an important number when coding shapes (whether a square or a hexagon). The Innovation Showcase was a favorite of all the teachers as they were able to talk with other educators about projects those educators had done and get advice on how to make it successful. One of the favorite project that Erica and Grace learned about and that is now available in St. Albans City School Makerspace is creating a hexaflexagon. By some tricky folding of a long skinny parallelogram, you can get a twodimensional hexagon that you can flip and reveal 3 different sides!
Overall everyone had a great day and were ready for naps at the end of it (well, at least the staff were ready for naps!). It was such a pleasure for the staff to see the students shine and also to see them take advantage of being on a college campus for the day.