Superintendent's Blog

At next month’s School Maker Faire, we will celebrate and recognize our students who have shown an interest in changing existing situations into preferred ones.  This is what Herbert Alexander Simon referred to as “design thinking” when he stated that:

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent—not how things are but how they might be—in short, with design…Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
—Herbert Alexander Simon, Nobel Prize laureate (1969)

We are very excited to showcase our students’ work in the areas of science, technology, engineering, fine arts, and mathematics (STEAM).  When students combine the components of STEAM in a trans-disciplinary fashion, each is able to engage in creational thinking.  Further, they are able to address real-world problems in a holistic fashion, oftentimes in a group setting.  Students are able to participate more actively since each takes part in designing his or her own learning experience.  The culmination of the “Maker event” is hopefully an “aha moment” for each student.  What we have witnessed in past years’ Maker Faires are our students’ moments of discovery – the “aha moment” – when the student has found something new in an area where there once was a void.

While the School Maker Faire is a showcase of the work of many of our talented students, it should be noted that our teachers and staff have made a deliberate effort to introduce more opportunities for creational thinking as part of instructional design.  All students have opportunities, and are encouraged to participate in our Maker Spaces throughout the district.  Our Maker Spaces are places where students can engage in design thinking. Further, our Maker Spaces are places where students are encouraged to seek and secure interdisciplinary relationships in order to build informational bridges that allow students to see problems from a new perspective. In the words of Grant Lichtman, “knowledge is not just for consumption” and schools are places where students are able to discover problems that they never knew existed.  According to Lichtman, “creativity changes learning from a system that is largely about consuming knowledge and ideas to one that is also about generating knowledge and ideas.” Teaching students how to be creative, therefore, becomes an important learning outcome for our students.

Examples of this process can be seen daily in our classrooms and Maker Spaces, but I would encourage everyone in our community to witness this phenomenon for themselves at the School Maker Faire to be held on the afternoon of March 16, 2017 in our Tappan Zee High School Gymnasium.  The location for the Maker Faire is now the TZ High School Gymnasium because the event has grown too large for the cafeteria!

I would like to express my gratitude to the PTA, parents and community members who spearhead this project each year, along with our dedicated staff who come together to make the Maker Faire a reality.  Thank you also to the Maintenance and Facilities Staff who added additional electrical capacity to the TZ High School Gymnasium to ensure that this space can now be used as a communal learning site where learning is a function of working, collaborating, and creating.

Register for the School Maker Faire.

A short video description of “Design Thinking” can be found at:  http://www.whatisdesignthinking.org/

Full disclosure of parental pride:  My personal inspiration for STEM Innovation in the classroom comes from a group of students at Middlebury College (my son, Robert, was one of eight students who participated in this research project as a Middlebury freshman in 2015-16). Here is their video at:  https://vimeo.com/201022871

 

 

 

 

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