#ISTE17 Congress: Under the sign of the "maker" movement

Our collaborator participates in the annual congress of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). Digital fabrication workshops (makerspaces), design thinking and creative chaos are on the menu!

The establishment and daily management of digital manufacturing workshops (makerspaces) in schools is a recurring theme at the conference of theInternational Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), which runs June 24-28 in San Antonio, Texas. This year, it welcomes more than 21,000 delegates representing more than 8,000 schools in 70 countries. The ISTE annual congress, it's big, very big!

Steven hauk, deputy principal of an elementary school in the state of New York, also presented a training workshop on the reasons motivating the establishment of these creative spaces in schools, which are often set up in libraries, classroom corners or in premises specially designed for this purpose. Essentially, for him, the movement maker in education is to facilitate learning outside the rigid constraints of study programs and traditional school organizations. It is therefore about giving students access to the best tools, whether technological or not, and using them wisely to carry out complex and authentic tasks.

Digital manufacturing and thought design

The digital manufacturing workshops allow a creative and collective construction of school content through an approach similar to that of the thought design :

• Targeting the problem: what complex situations deserve our attention and why? What are the sub-issues?
• Constrain the problem: much as the approach of " agile leadership», We focus on a problem or a facet of a problem.
• State solution ideas: we generate possible solutions and only choose one.
• Prototype: we build our idea. We give it a shape and this shape becomes a solution that can be improved.
• Provide feedback: ask others for their opinion on their prototype.
• Re-prototyping and perfecting: we make the necessary modifications and we perfect our solution.
• Communicate and disseminate: we communicate our solution and we highlight it thanks, among other things, to social media.

In short, digital manufacturing workshops allow the development, among other things, of a tolerance for ambiguity and flexibility at the basis of building a significant capacity for adaptation. In fact, this is inevitable since you never know what will be learned: the learning process is therefore more important than the final product.

An essential "creative chaos"

Jad Abumrad, host of Radio Lab show, a popular “podcast” show on curiosity, told us about his approach by presenting his recording studio as a laboratory for creation and reflection. Through various samples of his multiple sound universes, the speaker reassured the congressmen: the chaos is indeed existing and it is essential, so much that it seems preferable to the order which normally reigns in the classes of Western schools. "Nothing is ready until it ceases to be reasonable!" », He believes.