Fri June 12 2015: Spent most of the morning with the wonderful Aaron Vanderwerff and Sherene Judah, two innovative educators at Lighthouse Community Charter School, Oakland. This school has a maker-focussed component but more importantly has a highly personalised approach to supporting students, with very high levels of success. Looked at some programming being done by Kindergarten students, using simple programmable cars and also some robotic animals being designed and built for a “robot petting zoo”.
Again, the makerspace role was integrated into curriculum areas like science, english, history etc

Also met a volunteer from the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, who had on a unique T-shirt bearing the chemical symbols Lr, Bk, and Cf for Lawrencium, Berkelium and Californium, all discovered at Berkeley. May as well have added Americium so they get the full address of the campus.

Afternoon was spent with Cat Stam and Marie Phillips (two other members of our Hardie STEM inquiry group) at Exploratorium. SF. Lots of clever displays and a real-life version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (well, two actually – one accurate, one a bit less so using a drinking fountain and a squirting jet. “Prisoners” had to decide between drinking and squirting their fellow prisoner, with a payout matrix that I think needs more work.