SteamHead and MakeFashion Edu courses have moved to this site, SteamHead.space! Find it under “The Shelf”. The new course has more media and formatting, which makes it super easy to read quickly and pull out the resources you need for your class that day. Teachable has been awesome, but is primarily is for video / talking-head content. On our site, we can deliver printable PDFs and easy-to-read course plans to you! We do love video, btw, and you can see our best videos at YouTube.com/SteamHeadProductions Here is a great set of two videos to watch around Fashion Tech in the classroom, and see the channel for runway videos with amazing student outfits lighting up the show:
The Teaching Plan
The Result
See you on the new platform! If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us.
We’d love for you to get to know the SteamHead team better. In this series of posts, we ask the great people behind SteamHead some questions about the organization, the pandemic and their hobbies!
Starting it off with our co-founder, Carrie Leung.
What’s your proudest SteamHead moment?
Hard question, it’s like asking what’s your favorite movie! If I really had to say one thing, it’s that I know we created lasting change in the education community of Shenzhen that can be evidenced today – still going strong and continously evolving on it’s own (without us being there). The SteamHead community as a network has put makerspaces in schools, carved out roles for educators in the Maker Movement, celebrated student work at the School Maker Faire and MakeFashion Edu Runway events, inspired teachers and students (and these can be anyone – moms to grandparents to students) through opensourcing our methods, playbooks, resources and just simply by getting people into the same space. I experienced first hand through all the challenges and successes, that a group of people with a shared vision can definitely make a lasting difference.
What’s your favourite student project and why?
The first season of MakeFashion Edu left an immense impression on me. The season one cohort was magical for all of us. We felt like we were a team, we felt like our individual stories were being heard, we felt like each challenge made us stronger, we felt like our academic learning had relevant real world meaning behind it. Lucas, loved design, hid his talent for the fear of ridicule (bc boys shouldn’t like to design clothes) became an essential go to for help among his peers. Hayle, HATED math, started applying it to get her runway piece off the ground (by season two she conceded she needed math). Angela, Amy, and Lily learned not only to code and solder, but also finding their voice to speak about what their piece symbolized and why it should matter to all sorts of adults inlcuding the media. Coco became our engineering guru – helping everyone (including boys and older students) with their pieces. Peers that weren’t friendly before were now on the same team. While all of this magic was happening on the classroom level, the same was going on with the adults. It was a multi-school effort and the teachers, parents, and experts came together to share, learn, and put on the extravenganza. Socio-economic walls were broken down and a lot of great memories were made.
What’s the best part about working in SteamHead?
Hands down the people. Without the students, parents, educators, industry leaders, researchers, media folks there would be no SteamHead. SteamHeaders span across the globe, topics, skill sets, age, backgrounds and we support each other as needed. We are all moving in differenent ways toward the common goal of making relevant education assessible.
What are some things you’d like people to know about SteamHead?
1) SteamHead runs 100% on volunteers donated time, expertise and resources.
2) Until 2020, we operated with no exchanges of money. It was a thoughtful decision to help us and those who want to engage with us to focus what was important. This takes an immense amount of work and time to faciliate. In 2020, we decided to take money donations and exchanged our expertise for income in aid of emergency situations in schools in a timely manner.
What do you miss the most that you weren’t able to do during the pandemic?
I miss the SH makerspace in Shenzhen. I miss the SteamHead residents that come and stay for months at a time. We learned so much from each other. There are so many fond memories of that open space of meeting folks from all walks of life. We’d tinker together, ponder change together, and if things were aligned sprouted actions together. So many great things came to be with just being in an often hot and crowded space and some tools create together.
What is one positive thing that came out of the pandemic?
So much of what we do is hard to articulate. The world often wants metrics and evidence to prove things are achieved. I understand that. But there are so many things we do, our goals, and our vision – how does one accurately measure it? How do you measure the impact a teacher has on a student just by believing in them? How do you measure the agency a child develops by being allowed to run their own project? How do you measure the affect a mother has on her children as she starts to understand project based learning folds in a plethora of under valued critical skills for her kids? How do you measure the pivot to- one of understanding and questioning- instead of fear and insecurity when a student is posed with a challenge or a person that is unfamiliar? The most important takeaway from the pandemic is that it showed what we are doing at SH works. It proved to me that the things we build, teach and share whether tangible or intangible makes us positively contributing human beings. We acknowledged the situation and tried one solution after another. And when I say we I mean everyone in our network. I had young students confidently step up to the challenge of being head of household because their parents were essential workers. Citing the project management skills came in handy! I had students asking for help because they become local community leaders while their guardians worked. There were teachers sharing methods and resources. We had experts like Mike Shaw spin up a quick video on how to maximize online tools to help teachers that weren’t technical. We had a business donate a car so we can deliver kits to schools kids stuck at home. All the skills and mindsets we advocate at SteamHead, yea, it was utilized in full force in 2020.
How has the pandemic affected the way things in Steamhead are being done?
We’ve always had a “cloud community” our network being loosely connected online – this is now stronger. Support in the form of materials and tools are now donated with money equivelants. We believe a degree of online learning is here to stay forever, we have reallocated a bulk and time of resources in bringing our content online for free. This in fact has creately positive affects due to the fact we can reach more teachers and they can build on our materials. Our events like the School MakerFaire and MakeFashion Edu runway shows have pivoted us into the realm of the metaverse and virtual reality. It has been really fun and having a timeless showcase is a great way to share. This will be a component that SH will keep forever as it has the same positive affects of putting our content online for free.
What’s one topic that you could talk about for hours and hours?
History, humanities, and current events through the lens of economics and finance. I feel economics, monetary protocols, etc are a huge contributing factor in how it has shaped us as a species – I can talk about this forever! (People just glaze over when I start, and my friends kind of roll their eyes at me lol)
What’s your favorite season and why?
Oooh, I know this isn’t an answer, but it really depends on where I am. For example, if I’m in SF then it’s during Indian Summer Sep/Oct/Nov. If I’m in Shenzhen then Fall or Spring. Dry season for sure if I’m in Costa Rica. Wet season if I’m in Thailand.
What show/video/thing are you bingeing on right now?
Inside Job. An adult cartoon on Netflix. If you like Ricky and Morty – this tracks!
Learn more about Carrie by reading her profile here.
A SteamHead member and teacher managed a grade 5 makerspace class, and her students learned some financial literacy through using nano cryptocurrency.
For those who aren’t familiar, nano allows for fast and low-cost transactions, and is very cheap to purchase so the real-world fiat value is not as impactful on students as physical money might be. I thought it was a great tool to teach her students about financial concepts like budgeting, saving, and investing. Interesting to me – she did not hold lectures on these topics specifically, but rather blended them into her regular plans (if any of Carrie’s plans could ever be referred to as “regular”!).
To get started, she gave each student a regular and equal amount of nano to use as “payment” for classroom supplies. As her class was in a makerspace and focused on building projects, these supplies were important for students to obtain. Want more glitter for your cardboard racecar? Gotta check the pricelist.
Initially, the students could only use their nano to purchase supplies from the class shelf, and actually kept the balances on a paper list instead of doing real transactions. But after a week, she introduced a classroom bank which paid interest on deposits. To manage her time, she also started offering jobs to a few students who were responsible for running the bank, which paid a salary in nano. The concept of wallets was introduced, and the few kids who knew them were responsible for updating balances. For some 11 years olds, it was a piece of cake. For others, they wanted nothing to do with it.
After a month, she added another layer to the environment by charging “rent” for desks. This gave the students another expense to manage and helped them understand the concept of fixed costs. She also started allowing the students to transact with each other, rather than just with her as the teacher.
By the end of the semester, the students had gained a solid understanding of financial concepts and were using them in the pursuit of their projects. It was so rewarding to see how engaged and excited they were about learning about personal finance.
Guess where they did most of their work? The floor! No rent for floorspace! I wasn’t there but I imagine there was literal shouts of joy when they figured that one out, it must have been chaos! I wonder if anyone was already locked into desk contracts?
Overall, using nano as a teaching tool was a great success. It allowed the students to understand financial concepts in a practical and hands-on way, and I’m so SO confident that the skills they learned will serve them well in the future.
The SteamHead Design Immersion Curriculum builds upon the established educational values of existing design and technology curriculums to instill creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving skills to students across all subjects in a holistic program to prepare them for the challenges of the future. The curriculum is meant to teach students all the tools they need to be innovative creators: from the high-level concepts of design planning and community impact all the way through to the hands-on digital and physical tools needed to enact their ideas. Our lessons are defined and measured in the learning pathways found in this document via a series of “badges” that represent the level and degree of accomplishment in a given skill as the students progress. This method allows the most freedom and flexibility to students as possible. ‘Immersion’ best encapsulates our integrated approach towards technological and design education. It’s meant to reflect some of the value and efficacy of language immersion education because, like language, design thinking and technology are embedded in nearly every aspect of educational, personal, and business life. To that end, design immersion is meant to free these concepts from the barriers of traditionally siloed educational subjects and to cultivate creative problem solving as a dialect of learning. Our curriculum has developed and changed over several years as we implemented and experimented in the classrooms at Shenzhen American International School (SAIS) with the support of the amazing teachers there. SAIS has made Project Based Learning (PBL) central to their curriculum and philosophy and became the first entirely PBL school in Shenzhen, so it was the ideal environment to develop our curriculum. We expect to continue to innovate and develop it both at SAIS and in our own classes with the help of the larger education community. The SteamHead Design Immersion Curriculum is a collaboration between SteamHead, MakerSAIS, MakeFashion Edu, and Cultivative. We present the curriculum here as a living document, so that others in the education community might benefit from our efforts. If you would like to use this information to help your own communities, please do so under Creative Commons Noncommercial ShareAlike license, which can be found here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ For a commercial licence or consulting services, please contact us at https://SteamHead.space
Learning Pathways
Design thinking requires both a thorough understanding of abstract heuristics as well as hands-on interactive skills. We are building on the Stanford d.school’s Design Thinking Process of “empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test,” as well as a version of the “head, heart, hands” model, to ensure that students grasp the individual concepts of design process, how these skills can be integrated into any project or problem, and how to approach design with empathy. To that end, our four learning pathways, Community Impact, Design Planning, Digital Tools, and Physical Tools, divide skills into sensible categories for definition but should also be understood as one, gestalt design and creation process. E.g., a student’s hands-on experience with physical tools should inform their design process when considering possible materials and limitations for a prototype, and vice-versa with design process informing what skills might be needed for a project.
Community Impact
Community Impact is the most important, but also the most esoteric, pathway in our curriculum because it addresses the need for meaning and purpose in students’ work. One of the failings of older education models was their reliance on rote problem solving and artificial practice problems. Students can learn academic topics this way, but the ideas will feel disparate, not applicable to the real world, and, most of all, not interesting or important to the students and their community. Design thinking needs to begin with empathy not only as a virtue, but also as a pathway to listening and thinking about the needs of those around us then defining a problem to solve. Students share their work as the final aspect of this pathway to encourage self reflection and to reinforce that their project has impact outside the classroom. Starting from the perspective of community impact is the pathway that leads students to define meaningful projects, be motivated to innovate, and instill meaning into the work they do at school and beyond.
Design Process
The Design Process pathway represents the methods students need to ideate, manage, and revise their projects. This is the second of our abstract pathways, but it should be accessible and familiar to anyone who has tried to complete a task with more than one step: the need for planning and process becomes more and more apparent with each layer of complexity. The Design Process pathway allows students to pick up the problem they defined in Community Impact and attempt to solve it. They first ideate possible solutions or avenues of exploration and make drafts, then they organize the steps, tools, and other factors needed to create a prototype. Through practicing and organizing their own projects, students gain independence in setting up and cleaning up their work as well as become empowered to solve problems they choose rather than waiting to be told what to work on. This pathway will also teach students the meta-structure of design thinking and the purpose of the abstract scaffolding they are being taught both as constructs and as applied skills. For example, students would write a business plan for their prototype product that requires an up front understanding of the project’s resources, scope, and scale. Last, this pathway teaches iteration and testing: the important process of building on and learning from one’s work; the essential lesson that, contrary to the traditional mindset of producing “right or wrong answers,” we often learn most from the trials and prototypes that don’t work, rather than ones that do.
Fabrication Tools
Fabrication tools are often one of the first things that come to mind when the topic of project based learning and maker education come up, and understandably so, because few things inspire and excite us more than seeing an idea come to life in physical form whether it’s on the tray of a 3D printer or the woodshop table. While that base-level excitement fuels the creative and learning process, the Fabrication Tools pathway also serves as a grounding point and a means to solve problems identified in the Community Impact pathway and require forethought, attention to detail, safety, and management of resources. The classroom provides an environment where students can learn these tools under guidance and supervision, so they have the skills and respect for fabrication tools to use them in future projects and for the rest of their lives. Regardless of whether students learn tools and skills held by humans for hundreds of years like papercraft, woodcraft, and stitching, or they learn the kind of technological tools hyped in the headlines like 3D printers, laser cutters, and block circuits: few lessons are more powerful than when students become empowered to literally change the world around them.
Digital Tools
Digital Tools have transformed our world and made this the Digital Age, and yet individual apps, websites, and coding languages are quickly swallowed up in the shifting sands of popularity and technological advancement, so this pathway has to focus on the kind of digital literacy, frameworks, and heuristics needed to use any kind of digital tool in addition to those in front of us today. Our students often arrive to the classroom having been steeped in the digital world from birth, and the trope of adults needing to “ask a young person” how their own digital tools work shouldn’t surprise us. However, it’s naive and dangerous to assume that students don’t need a thorough education on this topic. The hazards of data security and privacy jump first to mind, but even common skills like file management can seem outmoded and unnecessary until they become a crisis of lost projects. Like the native language skills students bring to the classroom, students can already ‘speak’ with digital tools, but they need to be surrounded by educators modeling positive habits in order to develop that skill. The notion that classrooms should remove digital tools for being ‘distractions’ or to better serve traditional pedagogy amounts to hiding our heads in the sand in the face of an already digital world. Pedagogy, teachers, and students all need to adapt to these changes because digital tools open up entirely new modes of thinking and working, allow access to near limitless information, and are 21st century implements of innovation; we must empower our students with these tools if they are to be ready for the future.
System of Badges
Our Design Immersion Curriculum relies on a system of digital badges to measure student progress, allow for open learning pathways, and encourage self documentation. The badges can be implemented on a number of open platforms such as Badg.us, Badgr, and Mozilla’s Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI). These are systems for sharing a unique digital artifact, creating something similar to a scout badge, that consists of an image and metadata about the criteria, issuer, and evidence of the work done to earn it. The badge is then added to a student’s portfolio and can be brought to future classes or shown as a history of accomplishments. Research by Mozilla and ISTE among others has shown these badges to be an effective, evidence-based system to measure student performance based on actions taken, not facts memorized, which is important for the subjective topic of design. Digital badges encourage student agency as they strive toward accomplishable goals that excite them. Once achieved, the student engages in self documentation and reflection, which is meaningful for the learning process and necessary to reduce the resource cost for the teacher tracking multiple students on multiple projects. An introductory level implementation might involve attaching a badge to a lesson that all students participate in, but we plan for Design Immersion to have open-ended objectives that allow students to engage in true design thinking and explore new pathways. As they progress, students self document and ‘apply’ for badges, so teachers can measure and reward progress in skills even while efforts toward a finished product fail or are abandoned. It’s far too easy to see design projects (and other open projects such as in art or engineering) only through the lens of the end result, but there is true, measurable, educational value in the exploration and drafting phases of design that can be captured by our badging system.
