As this busy school year proceeds, I will focus on documentation of what my class does
the GitHub for my high school class
Students and society stand to gain a great deal if the youth of the world are enabled to build and design with modern technology. Fab Academy has done a great job for many years of supporting the expansion of the open Fab Lab network. For more than 10 years, Fab Academy students of all backgrounds have quickly learned these skills, based on the foundation of their previous knowledge and abilities. Younger students enabled with the same skills will pose even more opportunity for the future of our society, because of their relevant developmental position in space and time. Youth drive the world forward with their fresh perspecive and unfettered questioning of institutions from the past. Enabling today's youth to be relevant content creators in the world is necessary to continue the human tradition of crowd sourcing our own future from the production techniques available in the era.
The intent with this project is to make SLOs, and broader curricula, easy to see and understand. This will hopefully cause SLOs to be more extrinsic and observable by both student and teacher. In my own experience, 'gamification' and other non-traditional motivators seem highly effective to guide students through a curriculum and learning activities. There is no shortange of curriculum (at least in the United States) that students can work towards. Breaking down curriculum into small, approachable bits seems critical for moving individual students forward.
I imagine that, in many cases around the world, a Fab Academy style curriculum for younger students will meet a pre-existing curriculum that is intended to ensure that students learn everything they need to function in the society of their teachers. As well intended as intitutionalized academic curriculum may be, these systems often pose the risk of inadvertently neglecting very recent changes in society and/or the personal skills that support the development of their own academic SLOs. Regardless of this, teachers and schools are frequently measured against the locally insituted curriculum as a benchmark for their effectiveness. There is only so much time in a school day and many forces (such as teacher and student performance evaluations) that any good teacher needs to take into account when planning learning for their students. Therefore, teachers and schools may be hesitant to spend time working on Fab Academy style SLOs unless they can clearly see how it supports the curriculum which they will be evaluated against.
Developing the two above goals simultaneously will hopefully allow a useful Fab Academy style K-12 curriculum to be built and implimented. The use of this sytem for measuring progress against SLOs could be used by individuals and within institutions, while maintaining the ability to adapt as a living set of SLOs that is user-friendly and collaborative. Ideally, students should be able to track their personal progress against a flowchart of SLOs that will guide the growth of their skills over time as any curriculum does. However, by being an approachable tool this curriculum could be understood by the students themselves. [Traditional curricula are not intended for student use.] Teachers or parents could then track students' progress though the curriculum flowchart and help them reach their individual goals. Perhaps teachers could even share effective ways to teach and learn specific SLOs or recommend changes to the system. Furthermore, it may be possible to have institutions support the teachers and students by connecting them with other teams working on similar goals or adapting the flowchart to better align with locally instituted needs, curriculum and SLOs. There are many possible positive outcomes of co-developing a Fab Academy style curriculum for younger learners with an approachable way to communicate these goals and their benefits to students, teachers, and their institutions.
--Corey Rice, July 2017
Used to manage content and discussion before further development is complete