Maker Space - Digital Makers:
The space has been operational for around a month now and I have a great group of Year 7 and Year 8 students who are my guinea pigs. My idea is to start small and ensure everything works and to understand what the limitations will be.
The first major change was to move to PiServer - this is so that I can organise logins and students can save work easily. I had assumed that students would be able to login to google drive to save, but had not realised that the Pis lack an internal clock and were always wrong; stopping them from connecting to most secure websites.
Moving to PiServer was easy and I haven't looked back since. First few projects have been some small ones with the micro:bit. The boys loved making a reaction game using tin foil to create circuits. Picutres to follow.
11 September - Update
Unbelievable that my last update on this was in March - in my defence May, June and July were so busy with exams that we have had to put some things back that I would have liked to have been working on!
Anyway - a new term starts and progress has picked back up. I have really struggled to decide on what to actually buy and have chosen to kind of suck it and see - then I can see how the boys use the space and purchase accordingly.
22 March - Update
We took delivery of the six pi-top ceed last week. The Pi-tops were chosen as they are a modular desktop which is ready to have components plugged in, including the Raspberry Pi and kit like the prototyping board which allows access to all 40 GPOI pins on the Rpi. They have built in HD screens and can be picked up and transported easily - perfect for a mobile lab.
It was great to see that these were the monitor of choice for Pi Towers!
I am slowly putting together a shopping list for add ons and project potentials and have recently subscribed to Magpi which will be a fantastic resource for coming up with project ideas.
The next steps will be ordering furniture including lockable storage and large tupperware boxes!
MakerSpace Starts
February 8th 2019
Much discussion in the Learning Commons HQ today over the creation of a new logo for the MakerSpace and after much debate we like the bottom one best and so this lead to a total rebrand of all our logos. We have made a series of logos, which all relate to our school colours. A sneak preview is below.
By starting this journey, I have come to realise that there are so many resources, examples, websites and magazines all devoted to the maker revolution, that I am finding it hard to actually make any progress. So, I thought I would document my progress so that others may use it as a guide if they get the chance to create a makerspace.