During a maker party at the New York Hall of Science, kids used
MaKey MaKey circuit boards and Scratch programming language.
Photo courtesy NYSCI

Tinkerers of all ages are flexing their creative muscles during the Summer of Making and Connecting, a global project geared to empower digital crafters and match people with maker activities, online or on the street.

Running from June to mid-September, the campaign offers dozens of ways for kids, parents, and educators to make stuff digitally during the summer months and beyond. The venture is sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation in partnership with the National Writing Project (NWP) Educator Innovator and the Mozilla Foundation.

“People really love to play and make something,” says Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, NWP’s director of national programs and site development. “There’s a piece deep within us that wants to create, and we’re seeing it across so many domains.”

The project kicked off in June with the Maker Party, an online happening linking interested makers with design events, maker camps, coding challenges, and other activities. The idea was for people to bring their do-it-yourself spirit and apply digital tools to remix, collaborate, and share their creations over the open Web. Summertime makers are using the hashtag #clmooc on Twitter and elsewhere to tag their projects. You can also follow activities on the NWP Educator Innovator blog.

Makers can participate in real life, from Brooklyn to Uruguay, at physical events listed on the Maker Party site. Virginia-based educators Chad Sansing (@chadsansing) and Melissa Techman (@mtechman) launched a program called #nerdcamp this spring, and it’s continuing through the summer. On a recent July day at #nerdcamp, a mix of adults and one student were happily huddled together programming Arduinos, open-sourced circuit boards, to work with LED displays.

“The whole point is to tinker and see,” says Sansing, a language arts teacher at Shelburne Middle School in Staunton, VA (and author of the SLJ feature story “Life with Raspberry Pi”). Not all #nerdcamp projects succeed, however. That doesn’t matter to Sansing—and it shouldn’t to participants, either, he says. He especially likes it when grown-ups experience the rewards of “what it’s like to work on something you want to work on, for a long time, where you’re fully engaged.”

Virtual Summer of Making and Connecting participants include Susan Angel (@zsuzsannangel), a sixth- and seventh-grade teacher in Vancouver, BC, who built a short slideshow using Haiku Deck to promote her teaching and learning credo. Valerie Hill (@valibrarian), a teacher librarian at the Lewisville (TX) Independent School District and adjunct instructor at Texas Woman’s University, built a 3-D virtual book about media before and after Gutenberg. Adapting templates that Sansing had made, Techman crafted a page featuring thoughts people encounter while writing.

What happens to this outpouring of activity come September? The Summer of Making and Connecting “is not meant to live in the summer and die,” says Techman, a school librarian at Broadus Wood Elementary School in Earlysville, VA. “We want to bring ideas from the summer into classrooms, public libraries, and to other constituents.”

NWP’s Educator Innovator project is working on strategies to keep the creative connections flowing. And for those who didn’t get a jumpstart on the event this year, NWP and its partners plan to launch another one in the summer of 2014.

“This really is a movement,” says Eidman-Aadahl. “We want every young person to see that they can be a creator and maker of their own life.”

Jason Sellers and class onscreen at
the French American International School, San Francisco, CA.

Jason Sellers wanted his 10th-grade English students at the French American International School to improve their descriptive writing skills. So, while subbing for a fellow teacher earlier this year, he launched a three-day classroom project—on writing code.

Sellers, the San Francisco school’s academic technology coordinator and the technology liaison for the University of California Berkeley’s Bay Area Writing Project, says, “You hear a lot about gaming and engaging kids in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] subjects, and I wondered, what does gaming look like in English?”

For three days Sellers found out, adopting interactive fiction as his vehicle. As opposed to programming code such as Java or C++, interactive fiction sites use a pseudo code that’s only recognizable inside a particular game, which organizes the language into commands and variables that tells the game what to do. It’s the principles of code writing, but with more latitude; by stringing together words, kids can create an interactive world, which comes to life onscreen. One of Sellers’ students calls it “3-D writing.”

Lessons are based in Playfic, an online community where users write, share, and play games using Inform 7, a programming system for creating interactive fiction based on natural language. Games are simple to play—users just click and write as they would a text message. While low on graphics and sound, the games can nevertheless be engrossing.

Having played Zork games on a used Commodore 64 when he was a kid, Sellers had some experience with interactive fiction. Even so, he had to spend the previous evening boning up before presenting his lesson to the class. And it was a hit. “It wasn’t just something for their teacher to assess and get a grade,” says Sellers. “They were creating a game for classmates to play and that was fun.”

Most games feature some simplistic narrative, such as rescuing a commando force from enemy fire. But writing narrative code as an English assignment—as opposed to writing code to create a narrative game—not only allows greater creativity in the game design process, but also enhances writing skills and text comprehension in a different genre—an aspect of the new Common Core State Standards.

“What Jason is doing is giving them more tools to create games as producers and not just as consumers,” says Paul Oh, senior program associate for the National Writing Project (NWP). “They’re being given the opportunity to understand the narrative of the game and how to construct their own narrative.”

After posting his project on NWP’s Digital Is site, Sellers has developed a bit of a following. He and four of his 10th graders recently attended the California Association of Teachers of English conference in Santa Clara to present the project, helping teachers in the room craft some code themselves.

Should he try the lesson again, Sellers says he would strengthen the emphasis on descriptive writing, as some of his students were more focused on building a playable game rather than creating a world through descriptive language. But did he feel he got them hooked into a new world of gaming?

“I’m competing with a lot of other ways to spend their free time,” he says. “But I think it’s pretty cool.”

Photo by Altrendo Images

Digital research tools have a “mostly positive effect” on students’ work, according to 75 percent of teachers surveyed for a recent report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. But 87 percent of those teachers contend that these technologies also foster an “easily distracted generation with short attention spans,” and 64 percent believe that they “do more to distract students than to help them academically.”

The report, “How Teens Do Research in the Digital World,” was conducted in association with the College Board and the National Writing Project with the goal of exploring how teenagers’ research habits are evolving in the digital age.

Though the Internet offers a plethora of accessible research options, students’ literacy skills “have yet to catch up,” the report’s overview states.

Data for the 115-page report was culled from an online survey of more than 2,000 middle and high school teachers from the advanced placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) communities, along with online and in-person focus groups made up of teachers and students.

Key findings include the following:

“Virtually all (99 percent) AP and NWP teachers in this study agree with the notion that ‘the Internet enables students to access a wider range of resources than would otherwise be available,’ and 65 percent agree that ‘the Internet makes today’s students more self-sufficient researchers.’ ”

“76 percent of teachers surveyed ‘strongly agree’ with the assertion that Internet search engines have conditioned students to expect to be able to find information quickly and easily.”

“Large majorities also agree with the notion that the amount of information available online today is overwhelming to most students (83 percent) and that today’s digital technologies discourage students from using a wide range of sources when conducting research (71 percent).”

“Fewer teachers, but still a majority of this sample (60 percent), agree with the assertion that today’s technologies make it harder for students to find credible sources of information.”

“Given these concerns, it is not surprising that 47 percent of these teachers strongly agree and another 44 percent somewhat believe that courses and content focusing on digital literacy should be incorporated into every school’s curriculum.”