From left: Wiley Cooper, teacher Heather Phillips, Patton Hahn, Banks Tessier, James Hard and Frederic Smith.
As part of the Destination Imagination program, a group of fourth-grade boys from Crestline Elementary School chose to take on one of the 2016 challenges of a service learning project. There were many aspects of the challenge that they had to complete, including deciding a community need, creating a product to meet that need, developing a meme to advertise the product, and presenting these items at a communitywide event.
Over several weeks, they brainstormed many possible needs of their school. They discussed solar panels and a garden, and after much research, they decided the most pressing was a MakerSpace. MakerSpaces, also referred to as hackerspaces, hackspaces and fablabs, are creative, do-it-yourself spaces where people can gather to create, invent and learn. They felt if other kids had a place to go in school to just “make stuff,” then this could help them with developing creativity, problem solving and innovation skills.
After scheduling a meeting with the principals and realizing that space was an issue, they came up with the concept of a mobile cart. This was a way to bring the MakerSpace concept to classrooms, plus it didn’t take up as much room, and it cost a lot less.
Once this part of the challenge was met, the next phase was the development of a meme. They wanted to use personal pictures of their pets and got to work finding ones that would work. One student, James Hard, created two books of pictures of his guinea pigs in various settings, and after a group vote, one of those pictures was accepted by the group — Lola, the guinea pig, on a skateboard. The group liked the idea that she looked like she was going somewhere important. Coming up with a zippy saying was the easy part: “See ya round folks, I’m gonna’ zip on by the makercart.”
After these two parts of the challenge were completed, they worked on stocking the cart and creating tasks that students could use as a guide for innovation and creativity. They even filmed tutorials that were posted to the school website to help other kids learn how to accomplish different things by seeing a “master tinkerer” at work.
However, this wasn’t the last part of the challenge — they had to present this project to a community audience. They decided to present to all of the fourth-grade students, including the teachers, parents and others who were interested.
They have now seen this project through completion and were recently awarded the Spirit Award at the Central Region Competition for Destination Imagination. They will be moving onto the statewide competition in April.
– Submitted by Heather Phillips.
