Carrie Leung

by | Sep 30, 2021 | SteamHead Team

Carrie Leung is a San Francisco native, a techie turned teacher. She is a maker-educator focused on building open-community platforms for students, parents, educators, and industry to collaborate, learn, and connect. She has spent eight years in Shenzhen, China building project-based learning programs, embedding Maker Education, and experiential learning into classrooms. She recently piloted an Electronics and Media program at High Tech High, HTMNC in California.

Outside the classroom, her notable work include co-founding MakeFashion Edu, SteamHead non-profit, and developing the K-12 design program for V&A’s Design Society.  Carrie believes in actively arming the youth with positive physical, mental, and emotional tools they need to shape the future we will all live in.

 

By request, a slightly longer bio here!

Carrie Leung is a San Francisco native, a techie turned teacher. She is a maker-educator focused on building open-community platforms for students, parents, educators, and industry to collaborate, learn, and connect. She has spent eight years in Shenzhen, China building project-based learning programs, embedding Maker Education, and experiential learning into classrooms. She recently piloted an Electronics and Media program at High Tech High, HTMNC in California.

Carrie is a maker-educator focused on building open community platforms for young makers, innovative educators, and cutting-edge industry to collaborate, learn, and connect. She spent eight years in Shenzhen, China teaching in project-based learning classrooms and exploring ways to embed the maker mindset and real-life experiences into education. In 2019 she began building an Electronics and Media Program at High Tech High in California.

Outside the classroom, her notable work include co-founding MakeFashion Edu, SteamHead non-profit, and developing the K-12 design program for V&A’s Design Society.  Carrie believes in actively arming the youth with positive physical, mental, and emotional tools they need to shape the future we will all live in.

Carrie believes it’s all too common, in communities across the world, that these kind of collaborative opportunities exist but are not taken advantage of: whether that’s due to lack of connections, insular organizational culture, or competitiveness, the fact is that open-source collaboration and sharing is the best path for everyone to thrive and to make relevant education accessible.

Carrie is a San Francisco Native who left her Silicon Valley tech-finance career in order to make meaningful opportunities for the next generation, but her background affords her an insight into the complex corporate world—both its flaws and the kind of social good that could be possible if these powerful entities adopted better incentives and took a broader view of the world. She also learned to be pragmatic, to take gains where gains could be had, to counter strength with strength, but to offer support to those without the voice and power to stand against the world. Her goal is to create sustainable community systems that can outlive and outlast any single person and remain meaningful into the future.

In the News (links)
Find Carrie in articles here

Benjamin “James” Simpson

by | Sep 29, 2021 | SteamHead Team

James is empowering Maker Ed teachers, students, and schools with techniques and formalization of their makerspace programs. Living in Shenzhen for 8 years, coming from San Francisco, he is using his engineering and academic mindset to organize the chaotic world of Making into a system of learnable innovation by releasing Open Source tools, hosting public meetings, and donating time to organizations in Shenzhen and San Francisco.
 
Founder of SteamHead makerspace,
Education positions held: Tech Integrator at International School of Nanshan, Resident Engineer at High Tech High in San Marcos
Formerly an engineer at Adidas, Gap, NASA, Toyota.
B.S. Industrial & Systems Engineering, University of Southern California, 2002
Masters of Education, University of the People, 2022 (expected)
Longer Bio
James is empowering Maker Ed teachers, students, and schools with techniques and formalization of their makerspace programs. Living in Shenzhen for 8 years, coming from San Francisco, he is using his engineering and academic mindset to organize the chaotic world of Making into a system of learnable innovation by releasing Open Source tools, hosting public meetings, and donating time to organizations in Shenzhen.

James has always used community building and teaching to drive his work strategies. As an engineer responsible for restructuring and running manufacturing lines, his base methods focused on creating collaborative environments by breaking down socioeconomic and traditional workplace communication barriers. He set up workshops and projects that included members of management as well as line workers. These environments had rules and goals that shifted traditional roles, and allowed the two groups to share information and ultimately improve processes.

When James entered education, he sought to apply these some philosophies to classrooms. In order to create the collaborative environments that credit sources of knowledge to all participants, he found a need to bring university-level design thinking and workshop techniques to K-12 education, and built up SteamHead in pursuit of this goal.

Founder of SteamHead makerspace
Education positions held: Tech Integrator at International School of Nanshan, Resident Engineer at High Tech High in San Marcos
Formerly an engineer at Adidas, Gap, NASA, Toyota.
B.S. Industrial & Systems Engineering, University of Southern California, 2002
Masters of Education, University of the People, 2022 (expected)
In the Press (media links)
Find James in the press here

A Personal Story

 

SteamHead’s Neighborhood Earth program brings tech and design thinking to under-served schools and communities. James has a personal connection to this program, and has brought it to his small home community in the Mojave desert for several years.

“At my high school, I didn’t have access to college counseling. More than that, I hadn’t really been taught that college counseling was a “thing” people had.  This lack of access grew into an unawareness of what was possible. It meant that I had missed out on options to define life, not because I couldn’t pick a university or major, but because I didn’t see my peers doing it or hear from adults that it had been done by people like me before.

You can be anything you want to be

But how do you know what you want to be?

I grew up following instructions. I excelled in my traditional education classes, and if some device broke at home we would follow the manufacturer’s instructions for next steps of repair or hiring licensed experts. I took to the philosophy easily, and loved board games and the like that built systems upon these ideas.

I didn’t have a clear picture of what types of educational experiences happened after high school because I had no basis for comparison, and I was a person who needed exposure in order to form comparisons. I never thought to ask broader questions, perhaps I felt uncomfortable asking for options outside of what was presented to me.

At the high school graduation ceremony, someone put me in line with five students who were all going to college. It was a mistake – they had assumed that since I was at the top of my class with great grades, a passion for learning, and a love of teaching that I would be headed to a university. When I saw that those students were going straight off to college, I saw an option for myself. I searched my environment with new eyes and stole an old copy of the U.S. News and World Report, “Best Colleges” from the school’s front office.

There were a lot of choices, and I had no way of knowing where to pick. I hitchhiked to the University of Southern California a week later, about 150 miles away.

I felt strange as I wandered around the campus not knowing what I was looking for. I found some offices down an alley. They called an admissions officer over and we had a conversation about why I was there, how I got there, and what my grades were like in high school. He said I could start in January.

For me, it worked out. I found my way into the world of design, engineering, and exploration. I interned at NASA, Toyota, and Siemens.

Kids have options. The options exist, and they are plentiful and amazing. That is not nearly enough. Teachers need to be empowered to send their students questing into research and problems outside of a school’s four walls. Sometimes there are institutional problems, sometimes teachers are overworked, sometimes students are rowdy and unmotivated.

Why are we distributing content, visiting schools, creating spaces, and sharing stories? Because it is not nearly enough to simply create, we must share.

Action Shots

Testing microchips with SteamHead’s August Resident Educator

Creating a tape body form at Maker Ed Summer Camp

Learning micro:bit programming at SAIS

High Res Photos

Twila Busby

by | Sep 1, 2021 | SteamHead Team

Twila has more than 20 years’ experience in education, where she has been an advocate and trainer for Project Based Learning.
 
Most recently she has been the Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Shenzhen American International School which is the only wall to wall PBL school in Shenzhen.
 
During her time at SAIS she co-organized the Shekou School Maker Faire, facilitated Exhibitions of Learning, and was dedicated to guiding staff to design quality learning experiences.
 
While SAIS had one of the first dedicated school makerspaces, Twila promoted the idea that every classroom should be a makerspace, where academics support creativity and students bring their ideas into the physical world.
 
Twila holds a M.A. in Educational Psychology and prior to coming to China her work with school transformation led to her school receiving awards of Magnet School of Excellence and School of Distinction.
Zoom Reflectors

Zoom Reflectors

by | Oct 21, 2020 | , ,

Using John Umekubo's (@jumekubo on Twitter) Pocket Document Camera design and Amazon boxes, Twila and Elisa Busby just finished cutting/scoring and gluing 120 reflectors for their Tucson, Arizona students. This device redirects a laptop camera from the student's face...

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