Mechanical dissections are a practice that allows learners to discover the often hidden design of objects.
Activities & Practices
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activities and practicesCritical Sensitivity to Design Questions
Critical Sensitivity to Design Questions
A set of questions for students and educators that support critical inquiry and awareness when approaching human-designed objects and systems.
activities and practicesMaterials Exploration
Materials Exploration
This practice promotes noticing, play, and exploration. When learners have time to tinker with materials they can gain an understanding of the affordances, possibilities, and constraints inherent in a variety of making materials.
documentation and assessment toolsDocumentation Templates
Documentation Templates
This tool is connected to the Agency by Design Making Moves. The Making Moves identifies three maker capacities that support a sensitivity to design, along with their associated learning moves. Here you’ll find three observation sheets, one for each of the maker capacities: Looking Closely, Exploring Complexity, and Finding Opportunity.
activities and practicesTake Apart
Take Apart
Mechanical dissections are a practice that allows learners to discover the often hidden design of objects.
publicationsParticipatory Creativity: Introducing Access and Equity to the Creative Classroom
Participatory Creativity: Introducing Access and Equity to the Creative Classroom
Participatory Creativity: Introducing Access and Equity to the Creative Classroom presents a systems-based approach to examining creativity in education that aims to make participating in invention and innovation accessible to all students. Moving beyond the gifted-versus-ungifted debate present in many of today’s classrooms, the book’s inclusive framework situates creativity as a participatory and socially distributed process. The core principle of the book is that individuals are not creative, ideas are creative, and that there are multiple ways for a variety of individuals to participate in the development of creative ideas. This dynamic reframing of invention and innovation provides strategies for teachers, curriculum designers, policymakers, researchers, and others who seek to develop a more equitable approach towards establishing creative learning experiences in various educational settings.
pictures of practiceMaker Empowerment and Resourcefulness
Maker Empowerment and Resourcefulness
A practice that promotes the capacity of looking closely is the Elaboration Game. This picture of practice essay shares a version that was adapted by educator Tatum Omari for a group of young learners to examine a tortilla press during their unit of study about bread making.
Field NoteMaker Empowerment: A Concept Under Construction
Maker Empowerment: A Concept Under Construction
Agency by Designer project Director Shari Tishman introduces the concept of “maker empowerment” as a potential outcome of maker learning experiences.
publicationsIdentifying What Matters
Identifying What Matters
In this essay, leaders of the Agency by Design Pittsburgh network Peter Wardrip, Jeffrey Evancho, and Annie McNamarra describe their process of pursuing documentation and assessment strategies for maker-centered learning that are based on the values educators bring to their work in schools and other settings. Using the metaphor of big rocks and little rocks as introduced by Steven Covey, the authors describe the process of identifying one’s values and documenting and assessing student learning from the perspective of one’s values. They then articulate the lessons they have learned and their suggestions for moving forward. The core findings that emerge from this work are: (a) identifying one’s values is challenging, (b) documentation requires practice, (c) one’s values are linked to one’s content, and (d) visibility supports measurement.