Computational Making & Learning Workshops in California

On the heels of his Chicago event, Gary Stager is bringing his Computational Making & Learning Workshop to Los Angeles and San Francisco in December.

Computational making recognizes that the future is computational. Making things with code expands the creative canvas, supercharges mathematical thinking, and positions learners to explore the frontiers of nearly any discipline. While the maker movement gave us the ability to make things with bits and atoms, schools too often leave the bits behind a pile of cardboard — sacrificing remarkable learning opportunities.

Want students to solve problems, make cool things, and make things work? Computational making shifts the emphasis from being taught to students engaging in the act of being mathematicians, scientists, artists, software developers, and more. It amplifies the potential of even young learners.

This workshop's playful and practical experiences will help any educator shape the learning environment to support computational making and help students learn and do in ways unimaginable before. This approach offers an optimistic learner-centered vision of artificial intelligence that amplifies human potential grounded in timeless progressive traditions.

Stay tuned for the announcement of other workshops across the USA this winter.

Why Students Hide Themselves from Us

Our old friend Alfie Kohn is a national treasure with a rare ability to force educators and parents to confront their compromises. Each fall, he writes an essay for Education Week. The latest, Why Students Hide Themselves from Us, is another classic. Alfie reminds us that a lack of humanity is to be found in our behavior more than in the existence of screens.

Great New Podcast

Learning grows from curiosity, hands-on experience and student agency, not from obedience to directions. In this wide-ranging conversation, Gary Stager draws on four decades of work to take on AI, screen time, testing, literacy methods and teacher autonomy. Listen during your commute and arrive at school ready to hand more of the thinking to your students. Listen and download this entertaining podcast here.

New from CMK Press: Tinkering Time

Young children are natural tinkerers. Give them interesting materials, a good question and room to experiment, and watch what happens. We're delighted to announce Tinkering Time: 30 Creative Classroom Projects for Young Engineers, Artists, and Inventors by Alice Baggett, a joyful, practical guide to bringing hands-on tinkering into preschool and PreK classrooms.

Alice has taught young children for more than three decades and is the author of The Invent to Learn Guide to Making in the K-3 Classroom. Here she shares 30 classroom-tested projects, from bridges and shadow puppets to marble runs, magnets and simple machines, all built from familiar, low-cost materials and illustrated with full-color photos from real classrooms. She also offers practical guidance on designing tinkering lessons, scaffolding without giving answers, and explaining the learning to families and administrators. As Josh Burker, author of The Invent to Learn Guide to Fun, puts it, "With a mind toward sustainability and accessibility, these thirty engaging projects will keep your classroom, makerspace, or home busy crafting and building skills."

Order your copy on Amazon here. Or read more about the book, including volume purchasing, on the CMK Press website.​

Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager
Constructing Modern Knowledge