The Shelf life

  For this week, I looked through a few of the resources mentioned including Drawmatic AR which is a cute augmented reality resource that recognizes certain nouns and phrases written on the printable “magic paper” and brings those things to life using augmented reality. I will definitely be sharing that app with my middle schooler over the thanksgiving holiday, but what I really wanted to find was something for my future high school students that would be enjoyable and an enhancement to their education. In comes Labster. Labster is a lab simulator that currently has 169 simulations for high school-aged students which cover chemistry, biology, physics, etc. The simulations begin with expositional knowledge about the experiment and often utilize real-world scenarios. One of the videos on Youtube puts the virtual student in charge of finding the athlete who is doping by synthesizing the proteins from the athlete’s urine sample inside the lab. Another very cool thing about Labster is...

  The thing that stuck out to me after completing the readings is that a Makerspace is not one set thing but rather a response to the patrons’ or students’ needs in the creative process. Dr. Moorefield-Lang states in her lecture, “we’ve started looking at the needs of our communities and we’ve realized we need to make this more of what our patrons want.”  Which is a sentiment echoed in the article The Makings of Maker Spaces, Part 1: Space for Creation, Not Just Consumption. “Just as libraries are reflections of their patrons, Maker spaces can reflect the needs and desires of the local residents”(TechFifteen, 2021).  With that in mind, I decided to create a hypothetical Makerspace for the Charleston County School of the Arts (SOA) which I toured with my daughter a couple of weeks ago. SOA is a magnet school for arts-minded children divided into several art areas which include instrumentals, visuals, performance, and writing. The school is already well-outfitted with the ...