I attended the Constructing Modern Knowledge (CMK) Institute conference held in Manchester, New Hampshire. As the LS Makery Facilitator and Technology Integration Specialist, I was interested in meeting other maker educators and staying current with emerging resources to foster creativity. I was particularly interested in pedagogy for maker education and meeting some of the well-known guest speakers and panelists in attendance.
Summary of CMK Institute:
The CMK workshop/conference is rooted in constructionism (Seymour Papert), offering participants a solid experience in constructivist education, project-based learning, and maker education. A strength of this conference was the accessibility at a variety of entry points. There were teachers and administrators from K through post-secondary level from around the world. The format reflected the style of learning, with hands-on projects of personal significance with support from maker experts. There were panel discussions, reflections, and guest speakers presentations interspersed, which were all very inspiring and dense with information. At the end of the week, each project group shared their projects.
What were your big takeaways from the immersive technologies workshop?
I was thrilled to collaborate with a diverse group of maker educators from around the world. My team hailed from Hong Kong, New Zealand, New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Alaska. I learned so much from my indigenous Alaskan teammate who is from an Inupiat village from Barrow (above the Arctic Circle!) She was one of the most inspiring maker educators I have ever met. Her fourth-grade class crafts sealskin boats, and traditional clothing with whale and seal fur. Her students were tackling authentic problem-solving that had a sense of place and cultural significance. I feel inspired to do more work around traditional crafting and indigenous maker traditions rooted in the San Francisco Bay area.
Our group was ambitious and decided we wanted to build a Roomba that could clean stairs. Over the course of three days, our plans shifted to build a stair-climbing/descending robot. Our robot was able to successfully navigate stairs and we decided to decorate it as an Alaskan grey squirrel “Sriskrit” with a Swiffer tail. Attached are photos of the group and stair-climbing robot. It was quite a hit!



How does what you learned connect to your goals this year?
In terms of strengthening my understanding of maker education we had the pleasure of exchanging ideas with several well-known leaders in the field. Howard Gardner, Cynthia Solomon (the mother of educational technology), Jaymes Dec, and the founders of Micro:bits all shared their insights in panel discussions. They also circulated the room and helped out with projects as experts. Cynthia Solomon pioneered the Logo programming language in the 1960’s and it was a pleasure to get a historical perspective from her on computer science education.
How might this opportunity lead to collaboration with other faculty?
While our stair-climbing project was advanced for K-4 students, I got more experience using the Hummingbird robotics kits and got to talk to several other lower school maker educators about what they do. Another project group from Healdsburg, CA worked on a puppet show based on Peter and the Wolf, a music/Makery unit we do in 1st grade. They were incredibly creative using the Makey-Makey controllers to play music whenever new characters came onto the stage. I will be in touch with them to exchange ideas on how they implemented this unit.
Would you recommend this opportunity? Why or why not?
I definitely would recommend attending CMK for all educators and administrators. It is an intimate conference that really casual yet deeply immersive. It is a good opportunity to test out maker space equipment and connect with thoughtful ed tech leaders from around the world. They encourage making lots of mistakes, and everyone left seeming satisfied with what they accomplished. I also enjoyed the fact that the conference was centrally located in the same hotel where attendees stayed, so there was no issue with transportation or losing time moving about. The hotel was a short walk to the downtown Manchester restaurant and entertainment district, so it was very easy to get around.
Resources from CMK:
CMK Resources
Stuff You Loved at CMK
Popular Books at CMK
The complete Constructing Modern Knowledge Press catalog
Links from Howard Gardner
The synthesizing blog series: https://www.howardgardner.com/synthesizing
The video conversation with Jerome Bruner: https://news.asu.edu/content/inside-academy-spotlights-top-education-scholars
Whoa! This sounds like it was an amazing and worthwhile experience! I appreciate all the resource links and am interested to see how the Humingbird kits might be used in Makery up.