Jay Silver - STEM Everywhere

The fourth in the series STEM Everywhere is now live on Edutopia! In this post Jay Silver explores how curiosity takes root.

Jay Silver believes that providing a landscape that fosters curiosity and creates vibrant learners who are passionate about engaging with new ideas.

"The whole world is a resistor"

Check out his video Hacking Everyday Objects Inspires Students to Explore Technology

"The whole world is a resistor"

Students Owning Learning

James Klassen (@Hokeydadjk) shared a link to an education article 7 Essential Questions That Guide School Improvement by Steven Weber, Curriculum Director/Specialist from Hillsborough, NC.

One of the principal questions Weber asks in his article is "Who owns the learning?"

"The question is simple, yet complex. When I see a Makey-Makey lab or Genius Hour, students own their learning. When I visit a Career and Technical Education (CTE) class, students are designing and creating. When I see students working in collaborative teams and challenging each other’s ideas, I see deep learning."

It's great to see creative tech incorporated into the school curricula, and it's encouraging that educators are also seeing value in this trend and are advocating for its broader implementation.

Knitting Simultator

Mollie Makes (@MollieMakes) posted this link about a virtual knitting machine.


"This crafty game is created using your knitting needles as controllers and ‘a combination of MaKey MaKey and an Arduino tilt-switch’ so you can whip up a pixel-art jumper, stitch by stitch"

Hopefully this will advance into the world of online gaming, and we'll get to see jaw-dropping, on-the-edge-of-the-seat virtual speed knitting competitions.

MakeyMakey Theme Song?

It's always a delight when someone kindly composes an (inoffensive) song about you. Shane Abell (@ShaneAbell) did just that:

MakeyMakey is an awesome tool MakeyMakey is super dooper cool
A banana piano was just the start
Now we are ripping waves apart
Soaring around the skies like a top gun
Coding with Scratch is really fun
Unleash the creativity in your mind
Innovation in education is hard to find
So grab a MakeyMakey to make your day
It's only human nature that we like to play

This is just brilliant! Now someone needs to write the music to the words and make a video of a MakeyMakey device playing the song. Challenge, anyone?

STEM Drum Kit

Alex Semmens (@AlexSemm) has produced a short video explaining the making of a tiny, 3D printed MakeyMakey drum kit for his Scratch programming class at school. Great to see a project that covers so many tech curriculum areas: the students learn about CAD modeling, 3D printing, programming, and the conductivity of circuits.