Guides: Playbooks, Curriculum, and Lesson Plans
Guides: Playbooks, Curriculum, and Lesson Plans
For all the playbooks, curriculum samples, and lesson plans below, I led the writing, research, design, and illustration of the entire contents. In some cases, the writing was adapted from other internal sources, as is usually indicated.
Hundreds of Maker Camp affiliates worldwide sought guidance from Maker Media on how to run a program at their site. I edited and designed a thorough playbook to offer sample calendars, rules of thumb, and shared wisdom from previous camp facilitators.
Maker Camp Affiliate Site Playbook (44 pages)
Maker Camp Affiliate Site Playbook (44 pages)
Schools hosting Maker Faires turned to Maker Media for more guidance in organizing the events. This thorough guide adapted the Maker Faire Playbook to a school context, adding templates and sample texts to ease the burden on the educators who step forward to lead School Maker Faires.
School Maker Faire Playbook (41 pages)
School Maker Faire Playbook (41 pages)
This guide provided a welcoming overview of Maker Faire and blackline masters for classroom teachers to use before, during, and/or after field trips to Maker Faire.
Maker Faire playbook (31 pages)
Maker Faire playbook (31 pages)
The Makerspace Playbook: School Edition provided context and support around planning spaces for schools to make with their students. We interviewed successful School Makerspaces and compiled the best practices into this volume. It included tools & materials, safety, signage, practices, and snapshot vignettes. This project was developed with funding from DARPA.
Makerspace Playbook (84 pages)
Makerspace Playbook (84 pages)
The detailed instructional guide Maker Faire Hands-On Greatest Hits How-To was sent to Mini Maker Faire producers to help re-focus the mission of the event on hands-on making, not just exhibiting things made by Makers. The playbook includes overviews and signage.
Maker Faire Greatest Hits (32 pages)
Maker Faire Greatest Hits (32 pages)
Maker Media collaborated with Scholastic to create Make: Lots O' Bots as an introduction to making. The book includes interviews with young makers, profiles of projects seen at Maker Faire, and simple robot-related projects. I edited and designed it and wrote much of the original text. The book is available through Scholastic's book club.
NASA and TERC developed the Life on Earth...and elsewhere? curriculum to bring the principles and practice of astrobiology into middle and high school classrooms. I conceived many of the activities with a science curriculum specialist, and I produced both the layout and illustration for this book. NASA printed 30,000 copies of the book, and it is also available as a PDF.
I conceived, tested, and wrote projects for the first year of a science subscription kit for kids. Take a peek at three panels of the step-by-step instructions for the third month’s guide. Directions for two to four projects were sent in each month’s subscription kit. I also wrote light-hearted companion comic book narratives for each month.
This conversation starter and debate guide in All-Star Alien Hide & Seek introduces students to the statistical likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe. Then it engages them in a class debate to consider how much effort humans should put into passive and active contact. Students consider scale and apply what they’ve learned about the electromagnetic spectrum in this physics-focused unit.
Part of Waves across the Universe, a full online unit of five lesson plans.
Part of Waves across the Universe, a full online unit of five lesson plans.
This biology-focused lesson plan Tricky Transplants is one of ~150 in a middle-school science curriculum called Science Generation. It is part of Science Generation, which brings SERP’s heavy focus on literacy and civic education across disciplines to the ~150 Creative Commons-licensed, open middle-school science lesson plans we developed.
Part of Cells Teaming Up, a full online unit of six lesson plans.
Part of Cells Teaming Up, a full online unit of six lesson plans.
Over 2,500 visitors of all ages took part in a free "Learn to Breadboard" workshop at Maker Faire Bay Area 2019. I designed the step-by-step instructions for breadboarding noobs to use the ever-popular 555 timer chip in their very own instrument of the retro-future, a light-controlled theremin.
This easy-to-make project required minimal facilitation with the carefully designed instructions.
This easy-to-make project required minimal facilitation with the carefully designed instructions.
Visual models often come to students with an as-is inevitability. Here, a playful keyboard simulation lets students alter the ways sound waves are represented, and provides a friendly introduction to a valuable tool: an oscilloscope. The SciGen curriculum used technology to explain concepts through animation and simulations, here in a lesson about the physics of sound. See live oscilloboard.