Designing a Classroom Makerspace

October 2019

For our cohort meeting of October 2019, we gathered at Not Your Ordinary School (NYOS) Charter School. This meeting was led by Kira Lowery, a UTeach Maker Fellow who teaches 7th grade science at NYOS, and Phillips Adebayo, a current UTeach Maker at the time. We were able to tour Kira’s in-classroom Makerspace she’d set up for her students and discuss the process of building the Makerspace, acquiring the necessary and desired materials, and how she regularly implemented Making in her classroom. 

After touring the classroom Makerspace, Phillips led an activity where we designed our own measurement systems. These systems had to measure length, time, brightness, or some other quantifiable unit of measurement, but could not use any previously established units for that system. For example, a group designing a system for length could not create a unit that was dependent on inches, centimeters, etc. and a group designing a system for time could not create a unit that was measured in terms of seconds, minutes, etc.

My group decided to design a measurement system for time based off of Dolly Parton’s Jolene. We built a device similar to a flip calendar or scoreboard that measured time in terms of each time Dolly sang “Jolene” in her song. After building this device and testing it out, we presented it to the rest of our cohort and demonstrated its use.