11 Snapshots

Four school-based Makerspaces in action

Analy High School

Note: This snapshot is written by teacher Casey Shea

When I was in school, along with my regular academic classes, I had the opportunity to take practical arts classes in drafting, cooking, and sewing, as well as shop classes working with wood, metal, and autos. These experiences, in addition to summers tagging along with my jack-of-all-trades grandfather, helped to instill in me not just an enthusiasm, but a need to fix, create, and make things.

After a decade of teaching high school math, when presented with the opportunity to teach a new class that promised to let kids just make things, naturally I jumped.

Over the summer, a dedicated handful of students and I moved tools and equipment from an abandoned lab on the campus of Analy High School in Sebastopol, California, to a mostly vacant space down the hall from the headquarters of MAKE magazine. We built the tables and storage units, rummaged through surplus electronic components, and prepared to sail into the uncharted waters of Project Make.

The initial class consisted of 29 students ranging from sophomores to seniors, from AP students to those struggling in basic classes. The blend of grade levels and academic abilities provided a unique mix from which I believe all the students benefited.

Through the class, students have learned some basic construction tools and techniques, explored electronics by putting together simple and complex circuits, and dabbled in design, computer programming, and blogging. For several students, Project Make provided a first opportunity to use a power drill or pick up a soldering iron. Knowing that several people learned a new skill or understand a little bit more about how things work — how threads are cut into galvanized pipe, for instance — has been a very gratifying experience for me, regardless of whether or not they ever use the skill again.

As any maker knows, frustration and failure are most often a part of the process. Rarely does something work exactly as expected the first time; iterative adaptability is a requirement for success. One of my goals at the outset was for the students to develop tenacity and willingness to learn from challenges, to redefine and even embrace failure as a necessary part of the learning process. Results have been mixed but far more successful than in my regular classes. These lessons are hard to teach in a traditional classroom setting where success is measured through more standard means.

Besides sharing the joy and challenges of making, another goal of mine has been to develop and experiment with projects and activities that I could bring into my traditional math classes to help students grasp abstract concepts. Time and energy constraints have conspired to limit the achievement of this goal, but my idea notebook is full of sketches and possibilities that I intend to pursue over the summer for inclusion in Project Make version 2.0.

From the start, the response from the community has been extremely enthusiastic. Parents have donated supplies and hackable gear, requests for visitations from school and community members have been numerous, and the reactions overwhelmingly positive.

Lighthouse Community Charter School

Note: This snapshot is written by teacher Aaron V.

Walking into Aaron Vanderwerff’s Robotics class on a Tuesday in the spring, you would have seen 20 students working in small groups, heads bent over computers, soldering circuits, using new-found carpentry skills, or conferring with each other and their mentors. As Maker Faire approached, the students’ visions became more certain and activity in the room became more focused. This image of students working independently with the support of mentors on a project they envisioned had been something Aaron had tinkered around the edges of throughout his career; in that first year when he adapted Makerspace to his curriculum, the vision and support of the program, he says, helped make it a reality.

Aaron is a Physics, Chemistry, and Robotics teacher at a small K-12 charter school in Oakland, California. The students in his first Makerspace group were enrolled in his Robotics class. Students in the class were generally 12th graders, low-income, and went on to be the first in their families to attend college. Most students in the class did not choose to take Robotics and were intimidated by the class at the beginning of the year. The students learned basic electronics and programming as a part of the Robotics curriculum.

Aaron’s Robotics class introduces engineering as a possible career to his students. Building a complicated project of their own allows them to really see themselves as Makers. Exhibiting at the Faire gives them a real audience for their project, which forces them to be able to communicate about their project as well as bring it to fruition.

Soon after the first large Makerspace meeting, Aaron returned to school and announced that the class would be creating Maker Faire projects. Aaron knew that none of his students had ever attended the event and none of them had ever developed their own project from scratch.

A few days before winter break, Aaron spread out his personal set of MAKE magazines before his students and asked them to look through an issue for a project that caught their imagination. After 20 minutes, students shared a project they found in the magazine with the rest of the class. Their homework that night was to dream up a project – either something based on a project they heard about that day, or something completely original. Students returned the next day with individual ideas for their projects and presented these ideas to the class. After the presentation, Aaron asked students to form groups based on common interest and start working on a shared project vision. He emphasized that they should choose something they thought they would enjoy working on for five months. Before leaving for break, each team gave Aaron a proposal for their project.

After break, Aaron handed the project ideas back to students to get them thinking about the project they proposed again. Mentors attended their first full class session after break, and they used one student’s project to showcase project plussing to the whole class. After hearing the student present, mentors asked him questions about the project and gave him ideas to help him get started on the project. After the first full class plussing, mentors circulated to the remaining groups and helped them plus their projects.

The Robotics class met every day for 70 minutes. During the spring semester students met in their Young Maker groups once a week. This weekly meeting included students and mentors. In the month before Maker Faire, students met five days a week for 70 minutes and had the opportunity to work on their projects outside of class. In the final week many of them took advantage of this extra time.

Aaron encouraged his students to develop projects that were novel ideas, extensions of others’ projects, or even project that had been done before, but would be difficult to carry out. Although the class is a Robotics class, students were not required to complete a “technical” project, they could pursue a craft project, or a building project. Twenty students worked on 12 projects. These included:

• LED Soccer Ball: Different color LEDs light up depending on the direction of acceleration. In a project like this one, students ended up learning to program an Arduino, used technical specification sheets to use an accelerometer and to figure out how many LEDs one LilyPad Arduino can power, modified a soccer ball to protect the circuitry, and soldered the circuit together.

• Interactive Plastic Chandelier: Artfully repurposed, reshaped water bottles surround LED lights, and a distance sensor makes the light display interactive. The three girls in this group started out with a vision of creating an interactive photo frame composed of recycled materials, but after a Makerspace regional meeting at the Exploratorium where they heard from artists working in plastics, they decided they wanted to recycle landfill-bound plastic into a light fixture.

• Steerable Hovercraft: Based on designs he found online, this student first built his own working hovercraft. This task alone took the student a couple months as he had to work through many pitfalls on his own. In order to create a working hovercraft, the student modified his first design multiple times and in the end had to build a whole new design. After getting the basic hovercraft working, he embarked on designing a system to steer the craft. This student learned carpentry skills, physics, as well as the power limits of circuits at school; his biggest lesson was, however, that creating a project is an iterative process.

Mentors played the role of an outside consultant; coming from the “real world” gave them quite a bit of credibility with the students. Mentors met with students every one to two weeks. They would check up on the groups’ process and help students set goals for the next time they met. While they were meeting, mentors would often teach students to locate and read technical specifications, to find appropriate materials and tools for their projects, to program in a new language, as well as techniques in building their project. It took many of Aaron’s students a couple of months to acclimate to working with their mentor, but in seeing their conversations in the last month of the project, it was clear that mentors were an integral part of the process.

To prepare for Maker Faire, Aaron briefly discussed with the class what they could expect to see there. He focused mostly on making sure that they would all be able to get to Maker Faire and bring all the materials they needed to present. They also thought about how they could present their ideas to people as they walked by. (Next time, Aaron says, his students will be doing much more prep before the event.)

After Maker Faire, Aaron asked students to create posters describing their work on the project. The posters were designed to be similar to posters which scientists and engineers create to share their work at professional and academic conferences. The posters included a description of the project, a key scientific concept the project exhibited, an explanation of how one piece of technology worked on their project, and the students’ conclusions about the project.

As school began a few months later, Aaron started his Maker timeline in August, a few months earlier than in his first year (when the program’s regional kickoff happened in December.) In the first few months of class, students had “Maker Weeks” focused on soldering, crafting, building, and programming an Arduino. In addition, students mined MAKE Magazine for interesting ideas as a weekly assignment over the first few months. His Robotics students worked on their programming and building skills for two weeks. Then they had a focused introduction to important Maker skills for a week. After the initial phase, students started working on projects in a similar way to how they did it in Aaron’s first Maker year, with the added benefit that students had more exposure to the kinds of projects and skills they would later possibly pursue.

The Athenian School

Nestled in the golden oak-studded hills of Danville. California, The Athenian School has enjoyed a number of making programs for quite a few years– including a handful of making-heavy classes, a robotics program, and an aviation project–but more recently they’ve been bringing them together in a more coherent whole called The Makers Studio, funded in part by Athenian Parent Association’s fundraising efforts.

About ten years ago Athenian added a new space adjacent to the old barn, and now Athenian enjoys an ample 60 foot x 40 foot workspace. What began as three distinct shops for three different programs was redesigned two summers ago to integrate metal shaping, woodworking, welding, and materials more seamlessly. As part of the re-haul, the Athenian Parent Association sponsored two machines that teacher David Otten appreciates greatly for how much they open up the range of projects the kids can do — a laser cutter and a SawStop table saw. A third donor- sponsored addition was added this summer – a Makerbot Replicator 3D printer.

The Makers Studio supports nine Athenian programs/classes:

• Applied Science and Engineering classes

• “The Art and Science of Making” class

• Athenian Engineering Collective (AEC)

• FIRST Robotics

• “Spirit of Athenian” Airplane Project

• General Science Classes (Conceptual Physics: Rocket Boxes; Chemistry: Valence electron models; Biology and Environmental Science: Quadrangles)

• Electric Car conversion

• Applied Science Club

• Middle school “Innovation and Design Thinking” class (new this year)

• …and they use it to make science department equipment too!

The Applied Science class begins with a brief introduction to engineering, including that old favorite: the marshmallow tower. Then the students move on to an electronics unit, including learning to solder.

They eventually move onto microcontrollers, ending the term by building a line-following robot. In the second semester, they are free to invent something, anything, using the skills the acquired over the first few months in the course.

First Semester

• Ongoing self-guided review and integration of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology

• Fundamentals of creative problem solving, including up to 4 small-scale projects (electric vehicle, appliance dissection, microcontroller line-follower)

• Augmenting students’ engineering toolkit (engineering drawing and CAD, rapid prototyping, hand tools, some machining/woodworking/metalworking, soldering and circuit layout, microprocessor use and programming, etc.)

• Starting final projects

Second Semester

• Main phase of final project

• Interim assessments

• Final project presentation and demonstration (Athenian Faire and Maker Faire Bay Area)

The Athenian Engineering Collective (AEC) had been focused primarily on robotics, and was founded around the students’ desire to add a FIRST robotics team to the school. Last year they turned their attention to “giving back”, and they extended their scope to do outreach to inspire younger students in their community to love engineering.

Thirty-one fifth-graders took workshops exposing skills the AEC members use in their robotics design work, such as: welding, milling, lathe, laser cutter, and design software. The AEC members really enjoyed getting a chance to teach what they knew to the younger kids, like how to use the machines and how to drive the robots. The AEC members also came up with a clever cardboard design that the younger students then assembled and programmed to complete a simple task. The AEC members gave the fifth-graders a pre-written program that they then helped them modify to execute exactly what they wanted to. David noted that in hacker culture more generally, there is a tradition of starting with something pre-existing and modifying it, and so he advocates this as a solid instructional strategy–not just in programming but in other domains that have yet to take this approach.

The “Spirit of Athenian” airplane project is one of Athenian’s most popular offerings. A local benefactor named Marsh, who spent his career in aeronautics, wanted more young people to fall in love with aviation, and so he started this program with a large donation (facility, equipment, and volunteer time). It has proved so popular among the students, It now gets a good deal of support from the administration as well. It is fully funded and has in the neighborhood of 90 students participating. When the airplane is finished there is a lottery among the students who spent the most hours building the airplane to figure out who are the lucky few who get to do a test drive of it up in the air with one of the instructors.

A fully functioning shop space enables students to take on other ambitious projects, like the electric car conversion project. Athenian students designed and fabricated a motor mount so that they could replace the gas motor with an electric one and fit it within the existing chassis. It’s a good illustration of the power of using digital design tools, in this case SolidWorks, to make the modifications necessary to realize an ambitious vision. Beyond designing and machining it, they also prototyped it using cardboard to make sure that their design would be accommodated within the space constraints of their existing engine.

The tools Athenian has include a laser cutter, mill, two lathes, three drill presses, brake, shear, belt sander, grinder, TIG and MIG welders, oxy-acetylene, table saw, two band saws, air compressor, dust collection, an electronics bench, 3D printer, and much more. Over the coming years, they hope to add a digital oscilloscope, another 3D printer, panel saw, planar / joiner, router table, casting/forging, and vacuum molding.

David imagines that this space can eventually support the entire school, not just the science and engineering programs. Future interdepartmental connections he hopes to make include:

• Computer or research lab model

• Fine arts (set design, costume design)

• Humanities (ritual drum-making, historical clothing)

• Textiles and sewing

• Science and Culture of Cooking

• Lost Art of Living (a unique course introducing survival skills, or all the things that people knew how to do two or three centuries ago: how to catch food, prepare meat, sew clothing, make failure, but we’ve lost those skills. Athenian students will be the ones to survive a global catastrophe!)

As David began to research what the shop should look like a few years ago he embarked on a tour of about 15 other shop spaces in educational settings. I asked him to cite a few that he thought were especially interesting:

• UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering and Physics

• Laney College Woodworking, Metal Shop, and Carpentry

• The Exploratorium

• The Crucible

• TechShop in San Francisco and San Jose

A lot of the evolution of Athenian’s Makers Studio program was driven by the interests of the students, responding to things that they wanted to have happen on campus and expanding to satisfy those needs. It’s a sure-fire strategy for success.

Independence High School

Last December, Beth Alberts spent hours collecting driftwood to prepare for a lab class. In some ways, it fits right in at Beth’s school, Independence High School, a public high school about 6 blocks from the glistening ocean in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset area. In this lab, Beth challenged her students to use their knowledge in gravity and balance to create a driftwood mobile that didn’t wobble dramatically or tilt drastically. They manually drilled steady holes through the driftwood, carefully tying together string, wood, and a few additional beads for balance. They went through multiple iterations and lots of knots before accomplishing a perfectly balanced mobile – and identified the center of gravity along the way.

In another lab, Beth’s students opened the heavy covers of their science textbooks without using their hands. There were string and pulleys everywhere, including a successful attempt at linking the opening of a window to the opening of the textbook. Beth notes that students are becoming more persistent, not getting so easily frustrated at small, initial setbacks, and just coming to school more often.

At Independence High School, Robert Maass, school principal and active maker, and Beth Alberts, science teacher and inspiring/aspiring maker, are tirelessly working to create an environment that allows safe, engaging exploration. They have revamped Beth’s classroom into an interdisciplinary welcoming space – for students and teachers alike – to build hands-on projects, try out new skills, or just hang out and sketch. Beth teaches both “project” and “lab” classes each week: project classes can be on any topic and on any project, from hacking toys and beading to designing stencils and created stained glass pieces. Robert teaches project classes too, when he can. Beth’s lab classes are more science-focused, with a key concept that she addresses, but also seamlessly integrate hands-on projects that require some exploration, some frustration, and lots of manual dexterity.

In one Friday’s project class, a small group of teachers and students learned how to work with stained glass. With the instruction and facilitation of Mei Lie Wong, a friend in the community, students learned how to use glass tools to carefully score and break pieces of colored glass into the shapes and sizes they desired. They fiddled with smoothing rough edges, arranged their pieces into an optimal design, and applied copper tape. At the end of the hour, all participants had their own unique – and beautiful – version of a window ornament. In the next session, they would learn how to solder all the pieces together.

Unlike the vast majority of high schools, Independence High School does NOT require students to attend every class from 8am to 2pm, Monday through Friday. Rather, it’s an independent study school.

Students are required to meet with a teacher or advisor at least once per week, for a full class period, but are otherwise welcome to be at school for as much – or as little – time as they desire. Naturally, they’re encouraged to attend electives, connect with their fellow students, join in activities, study, etc and in fact, many do. Bianca comes to school every single day.

Sometimes, students even bring friends (who attend other high schools) to Independence.

With an unusually supportive principal and a teacher who never runs low on new ideas, Independence is creating a fun, engaging space for the whole school community. More teachers are involved, bringing in new ideas and hobbies, interested in helping or leading a project class; more students are coming, and coming back. And everyone is just more excited to learn and do.

Pittsburg High School

Pittsburg High School in Pittsburg, California, started on the path towards “making” many years ago, when Andreas Kaiser was teaching math and started an afterschool club to get kids involved in LEGO robotics, while in his math classes they built house models. He started this effort because he wanted his students to experience the kinds of things that he enjoyed in high school and in college. Eventually he persuaded his administration to take the plunge and start a computer-aided design course, later adding an architectural design and a robotics class. In those first few years, Andreas and his students were jammed into a portable classroom, with little elbow room to work on projects. But Pittsburg High School recently moved to a brand-new building in which both Andreas and his colleague, Hillel Posner, enjoy ample room for their students and their projects. Hillel is the woodshop teacher, and he and Andreas have worked together to create an introduction to Makerspace course.

Andreas’ classroom has banks of computers at the front of the class, and in the back he has a shop with tables and storage, including a great accumulation of repurposable items that he’s collected over the last few years, including two projects in the back of the shop: a disassembled electric scooter and a kid’s PowerWheels toy vehicle, which students were troubleshooting and repairing.

Andreas says his classrooms are very much a work in progress. In one class he has 40 students, so one challenge he faces is how to manage a class that large, when so many students are working at different paces and later even on different projects. He is also trying to find ways to organize the shop so that it can be almost self-sufficient, meaning that students know how to use what’s back there and how to put away things once they’re done with them.

One way that Andreas and Hillel collaborate is having the students design furniture in 3-D using SolidWorks, printing out small prototypes using the 3-D printer, then going over to the CNC to cut out the full-size version. Hillel has a 4x8-foot CNC router with a vacuum head. Hillel’s students created this rocket- shaped shelving unit using Autodesk’s 123D Make.

This year Andreas has a couple of large projects– Balsa wood bridges and gliders–that he and his students will pursue through the MESA program. MESA stands for “Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement,” and it is run statewide by the Office of the President of the University of California, but other states have their own MESA programs. After designing their MESA projects on the computer and realizing them through advanced fabrication tools, in the next semester, after the students have gotten the hang of making things, they will work on projects of their own design.

Many if not most of Hillel’s woodshop students start the year without being able to read a ruler, to add and subtract fractions, or to use a computer. For kids who already have the skills, they can take on an open- ended challenge such as “design a board game.” Instead, Hillel feels that a more systematic approach– that is, taking small steps to get them used to the tools and the making mindset over the course of a semester or year–yields more success. Hillel tries to find that happy medium: where the most students can succeed, without stifling those who are ready for more personalized and creative project challenges.

Hillel noted that in his decade of teaching woodshop (including CNC and laser cutting), in classes of 30–40 students he will see just two or three students who get past the basics to begin to realize the creative potential of the advanced tools available to them. Hillel identifies students to work as teaching assistants after they have succeeded in a beginning class, where they help both with instruction and with organizing tools.

These TAs handle the day-to-day tasks. Andreas took this bit of advice from Hillel and for every class of 40, he always finds four students to play this kind of leadership role.

One goal that Hillel and Andreas have this year is to design their courses in a way that gives all of their students an opportunity to experience using these higher-end tools. To give an example of his more deliberate approach to teaching, Hillel described a basic drafting exercise, using triangles and a T-square on paper. You can find these kinds of exercises in many drafting textbooks. In doing this, his students are learning basic skills such as measurement and drawing. From there they go to the computer and render it in 2D graphics. Then they go to SketchUp to represent their designs in 3D. Finally, they take those images to the woodshop and manufacture on the CNC and laser cutter. By the end of the semester the students would be making a simple deskplate with their name on it. In another class project, students create finely crafted cutting boards which are then sold in local gift shops, and all proceeds support the program back at the school.

The Menlo School

In one corner of the classroom sits a hand-built air hockey table, designed and created from scratch by two high school girls in Dr. James Dann’s Applied Science Research (ASR) class at the Menlo School in Atherton, California. It’s perfectly functional, a second iteration with at least 500 individually drilled miniscule holes to allow for the correct rate of air flow. On another table nearby is a motorized go-kart, and an Induction Maglev track sits close-by as well. Models of student-designed motors – the first project of the year in ASR – are stored high above a set of cabinets. In order to build the motors, students had to learn about and put together a number of concepts and skills: magnetic fields, torque, alternating/direct current, wood construction, 3D printing, etc. And hidden behind cabinet doors are materials for the second project of ASR – a high-altitude weather balloon that needs to launch (often 1000 feet above ground), collect data about atmospheric conditions via its various sensors, and transmit data about its position in order to be retrieved. These projects are only a sample of the ingenuity, creativity, and real learning that happens in Dr. Dann’s classroom. He talks about them – the projects, the class, his students – with a light-hearted chuckle that belies the true passion and care that accompanies his teaching. In June 2012, he was given the Distinguished Teacher award, a designation voted on by students and a plaque that he proudly displays in his office.

A scientist by training who had a career at CERN before he dove into education, James teaches not only Applied Science Research but also freshman physics and AP Physics C. There is no doubt that he likes teaching physics overall, but it’s obvious that he loves teaching physics in a hands-on, project-based, non- traditional way that eschews standards and test prep and instead focuses on design, building, iteration, analysis, and presentation. The juniors and seniors who voluntarily take ASR as an elective jump right into projects. In line with James’ teaching philosophy, skills and topics are taught on a need-to-know basis, where they’ll be utilized and applied immediately. This way, students don’t learn about the ideal gas law four years too early and then, have to re-learn it again when it becomes useful for calculating atmospheric pressure. Instead, they learn how to strip wires, program sensors and Arduinos, calculate magnetic fields, create 3D CAD sketches – all for the purposes of their projects. In other words, they make.

Students spend the first five to six weeks of a 14-week semester making a motor. They must learn the concepts, build a functional motor, take measurements to prove and understand how it works, and write a paper about it. This is no small feat, as a motor is actually quite a complicated machine that takes into account all aspects of physics: mechanics, electricity, and magnetism.

The second project, which takes up the remaining weeks of the first semester, is one based more in scientific research: making, launching, and collecting data via a weather balloon in order to better understand and interpret atmospheric science. Two months worth of work culminate in a 12-hour Saturday where James and his students head up to Marin and launch each group’s weather balloon. There, they hope that all the mechanics, radio transmitters, GPS chip, backup data collectors, and sensors work perfectly – if for no other reason than to easily track the landing location of the balloon. Otherwise, the day extends a bit longer with wild-goose weather-balloon chases through woods and over rooftops. Back in the classroom, students, fully immersed in their scientific responsibilities, review their data in order to interpret their findings and conclusions. Last year, the class had 3 groups go up above 120,000 ft. and the students were able to recover all three payloads and all data.

Here’s one group’s video of their balloon heading up to space.

Students in ASR embark on a second-semester project of their own choosing. Some work individually, others in groups, and they all spend at least one full week brainstorming and researching different project ideas and wishes, often using MAKE Magazine and Scientific American as starting points. Some focus on variations of tried-and-true engineering projects, including modified scooters and go-karts, but others venture down a more scientifically-inclined route, building Helmholtz coils for deeper scientific research. Whether they choose to work as a group or on an individual basis, all students inevitably collaborate with one another. Students have differing levels of academic and practical knowledge, and those with expertise in one area trade secrets and strategies with students with experience in another realm. Whether intentional or not, the classroom becomes a lively, messy, and collaborative space for hands-on, real- time learning.

The final products of the class are visible – they sit on floors and tables and are often displayed at Maker Faire in May. They also survive as models for the next year’s class. In addition to the actual projects, there are other products too: research papers. James asks students to write scientific research papers for each of their projects, providing constructive feedback on progressive drafts throughout the semesters. He meets with them periodically, and he grades them on their concepts, analysis of data, clarity of explanation – all components of actual papers published in journals. There are abstracts, historical background, graphs, charts, 3D drawings, formulas, technical specifications, calculations, scientific theory and calibrations, conclusions, and appendices. Papers range from 20 to 60 pages in length and force these juniors and seniors to translate their learning into a real-world format. Along the way, they learn how to write too. There are no tests, no quizzes, no high- stakes evaluations, just papers that show the students’ processes and demonstrate their understanding.

With more than six years of ASR under his belt, James has triggered an increased appreciation and interest in learning through making. Before the beginning of this 2012-2013 academic year, James’ classroom was a typical science classroom, bright and sunny with wall cabinets and floor cabinets jammed full with measurement tools, woodworking equipment, electronics parts and sensors, and a sole 3D printer. It contained about 4 big benches, along with a few small tables and chairs, and one side was lined with 6-8 iMacs. Originally, James had to do a lot of wheeling-in and wheeling-out, and students spent a solid chunk of their 55-minute class period setting things up and putting things away. This past summer though, the plows and backhoes were out in full force, as they cleared out and repurposed the Upper School’s basement storage space into a new ASR space: officially christened the Whitaker Lab in late October. The dusty basement is now a well-lit, vast expanse of workspace, complete with movable desks and carts, a conference room for brainstorming and presentations, an equipment area with a table saw and laser cutter, a Robotics wing, and even a sunny patio. It is well-used too, housing not only James’ classes but also Engineering, MBEST (Menlo’s Bridge to Engineering, Science, and Technology program for girls), and Robotics. James sets up – and leaves out – vacuum and temperature chambers, woodworking and electronics tools, and measurement stations. At long last, the space matches the aspirations of James’ classes and intentions.

He hopes to continue teaching Applied Science Research – and offer more of it – to students (and girls especially) in the years to come. James acknowledges the steep learning curve that he embarked on as he uncovered how to best teach a class like this, and he happily and willingly offers his experience and wisdom to other teachers who are bringing making to their classrooms and schools – with whatever supplies and whatever budget. It’s obvious that he’s done a remarkable job in just a few years; a graduated senior stopped by his classroom to say hello during our summer conversation and ask about when he could drop by to do some work. This particular student entered Menlo School with an unlikely background from a struggling socioeconomic sector, and he walks away headed to Duke, supported by his experiences learning from and with Dr. James Dann.