Phew! It’s taken me about a week to recover, and I take that as a sign of it’s supreme awesomeness. The Bay Area Maker Faire is the largest DIY festival in the world. Not the ‘repaint the kitchen’ kind of DIY but the ‘take control of your life and enjoy doing all kinds of stuff for yourself that people normally think you can’t do for yourself’ kind of DIY. It’s mecca for us!
A bit of background for newbies – MF is created by Make Magazine, it’s now in it’s 6th year, has about 80,000 visitors over 2 days, and has already spawned several smaller Maker Faires in other cities and more and more community organised mini Maker Faires every year too (one in Seattle this wkd!).
It feels like in the beginning it was quite technology/electronics focused, but every year it’s encompassing more and more kinds of making and doing (now including stuff from growing food to music to astronomy) and for me, that’s what makes it reign over all other festivals. It’s now really becoming about an approach to life, a place learn and get inspired through trying out, and a symbol of the phenomenal growth in the number of people looking to play a more active role in things and improve them – from where their food comes from to how their schools work.
We loved being part of it again this year, and thank you to all the lovely sugru users locally who helped us out on the booth! Our photos from the weekend are on flickr and facebook. Apart from the awesomeness of meeting lots of familiar faces and new friendly faces on the sugru booth, there were a bunch of things there that left me wide-eyed, buzzing and blabbing to anyone that would listen, too much for one blogpost, so this is the first of a few posts!
Gever Tully’s talk on the thinking behind Brightworks – an extraordinary school
Gever (Tinkering School, Fifty Dangerous things you should let your children do) talked through the plan for Brightworks, a new school that he and Bryan Welch are opening in September this year, and the learnings and thinking behind it. It blew me away. Brightworks reimagines the idea of school as the intellectual and creative heart of the neighbourhood. It does away with tests, grades and segmenting by subject, and instead proposes a structure they call ‘an arc’ that allows students of different ages (from 6 to 12) and abilities to learn by addressing a central theme from multiple perspectives together over a cycle that lasts a number of weeks.
Working in teams grouped by the students’ particular interests and choices, they address the theme through self-devised guided projects. A structure of three phases – exploration, expression and exposition – is used to focus on fostering curiosity, independent thought, and working with others as well as everything else needed to address the subject, skills like reading, calculating, science, engineering, music, drawing, building or whatever else is relevant.
This is a prototype school initially, and will start with around 30 children. To realise the project, it’s necessary for it to be a fee-paying model at the beginning as Brightworks have chosen to get it up and running and learn how well it works rather than go the slow and painful (and unlikely) route of convincing the authorities to adopt it from the outset. They are committed however to it being a diverse group so there is assistance available for up to half of the families. One of the most inspiring things for me is that they’re just going ahead and doing it, without worrying about lots of official stuff, because they believe in it so much, and then they can see from there how to improve it, grow it, make it fairer, more official etc. in time. I wish them all the luck in the world and I really look forward to seeing where this goes!
You can watch Gever’s talk from Maker Faire here (26 mins), and read more at www.sfbrightworks.org
PS More Maker Faire best bits to come over the next week or so!
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