iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Design and build your own cardboard boat for a summer activity or for testing in the bathtub. Don’t forget to find the failure points.

I’ve been curating everything I can find to help teachers learn about Google Expeditions and Google Cardboard, and I have created the Ultimate Google Cardboard and Expeditions Resource Guide for Teachers. I am not an expert on virtual reality or Google Cardboard and Expeditions, but I am a connected educator and I have found some amazing resources to help you learn more about these amazing tools. This guide contains the basics, how to get started, resources for buying devices and headsets, as well as troubleshooting help, YouTube tutorials, blog posts, lesson plans, apps and more! I am a learner first, so as I learn and curate resources, I will share them with the Shake Up Learning readers.

Cardboard Creations Maker Education Camp utilized no technology (except for projecting images of example projects on the whiteboard) and low/no cost materials. Many of the discussions about and actions related to integrating maker education into educational environments center around the use of new technologies such computer components (Raspberry Pis, Arduinos), interactive robots for kids (Dash and Dot, Ozobots, Spheros), and 3D printers. These technologies are lots of fun and I facilitate Robotics and Computer Science with my gifted students and at one of my summer camps. The learners engaged in these high tech learning activities with high excitement and motivation. Such high excitement, engagement and motivation, though, were also seen at my low tech/low cost maker education camps: LED crafts, Toy Hacking and Making, and Cardboard Creations.

With some thick cardboard, a cutting knife, some hot glue, a ruler, and probably a bit of trial and error, you can create your own DIY coin sorting machine. The key to the sorting “mechanism” is to cut the right size holes in the correct order—smallest to largest. Watch this how-to video from The Q.

"I've been curating everything I can find to help teachers learn about Google Expeditions and Google Cardboard, and I have created the Ultimate Google Cardboard and Expeditions Resource Guide for Teachers. I am not an expert on virtual reality or Google Cardboard and Expeditions, but I am a connected educator and I have found some amazing resources to help you learn more about these amazing tools. This guide contains the basics, how to get started, resources for buying devices and headsets, as well as troubleshooting help, YouTube tutorials, blog posts, lesson plans, apps and more! I am a learner first, so as I learn and curate resources, I will share them with the Shake Up Learning readers.

Google Cardboard and Google Expeditions are hot topics in the edtech world and with good reason! These tools can help flatten the walls of our classrooms and allow us to take students on virtual reality field trips and engage students in new ways. Virtual reality is one of the fastest growing areas of technology! VR is in its infancy and we are just scratching the surface of what this technology can do and how it will transform learning in our classrooms."

Another cardboard activity along the side of the Large scale & Small scale stop motion animations in the event of Infinite Versatility of Cardboard was Making Cardboard Costumes. This time, we set up our favorite “Tinkering photo frame” for people to capture their cardboard costumes, and to take this photo booth experience online, we also set up a hashtag #cardboardtinkering and used a social media wall "Walls.io" so that we could collect all the pictures with the hashtag and display them as a live-updating photo album on the large monitor during the event.

We revisited large scale stop motion animation yesterday as part of our Infinite Versatility of Cardboard celebration. We used a plain cardboard backdrop and simple painted cardboard props to tell short stories. Here's a small sampling of some of the animations made during the event!

When considering where to start with our new after school Makerspace Club it was onlyfitting to begin with an idea which epitomizes the ideologies of the Maker Movement…. the wonderful story of a young boy Caine who created arcade games from cardboard.