Since 2013, NEXMAP's education STEAM program focuses on the intersection of science and the arts.
STEAM‐powered learning (STEM + the Arts = STEAM) and the skills, concepts and learning experiences that build creative confidence and technical and expressive expertise. Since the fall of 2012, NEXMAP has worked with more than 300 teachers and 200 youth in formal and informal settings — schools, libraries, museums, summer programs — to introduce 21st Century Notebooking and the fundamentals of paper circuitry to professional educators and a diverse and highly engaged community of learners.
USPTO NATIONAL TEACHER SUMMER INSTITUTE
July 18-19, 2016: Michigan State University; "How Might We...." workshop on Invention and Innovation in the Classroom.
TEEN CAMP - FLASH MEMOIR
July 11-15, 2016: UC Berkeley. A 21c Notebooking program offered by the Bay Area Writing Project. Take a look at the video for a soldering activity hosted at UC Berkeley's Invention Lab.
CELEBRATION OF MAKING WITH PAPER CIRCUITS
June 22, 2016: For the National Week of Making, #NationOfMakers. This program was offered by Manylabs and Children's Creativity Museum.
TASSP & TESPA
June 15-17, 2016: In Austin, Texas - School Administrator Conferences with Molly Adams, National Writing Project Teacher Consultant and member of the North Star of Texas Writing Project.
LITERACY, CRAFT, CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
October 8, 2016: NEXMAP created an exploration of the paper circuitry strand for Letters to the Next President 2.0. at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA. This workshop guided educators through a hands-on project using a "How Might We...." template and a series of writing, collaboration, and design exercises to explore strategies for organizing information, gathering feedback, refining, and developing ideas.
Participants worked with an 11X17 worksheet and completed a project that was ready to share with students. We looked at the L2P website and discussed planning and implementation strategies for bringing this civic engagement experience to the classroom and involving students in a national conversation about the upcoming election. For more information on the program see our L2P program page.
LITERACY, CRAFT, CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
September 24, 2016: NEXMAP created an exploration of the paper circuitry strand for Letters to the Next President 2.0 at the UC Berkely Graduate School of Education's Second Annual Multicultural Urban Secondary Education (MUSE) English Educators Program. See the conference flyer. This workshop guided educators through a hands-on project using a series of writing, collaboration, and design exercises to explore strategies for organizing information, gathering feedback, refining, and developing ideas.
Participants worked with 11X17 activity templates and completed a project tha was ready to share with students. We looked at the L2P website and discussed planning and implementation strategies for bringing this civic engagement experience to the classroom and involving students in national conversation about the upcoming election. For more information on the program see our L2P program page.
PROTOTYPING ON PAPER WITH THE ATTINY85 AND MICRO SERVOS
May 14, 2016: Manylabs, SF. We expanded the Hack Your Notebook series! You know the first two – Illuminate Your thinking with Jie Qi and Program Your Pages with Natalie Freed. We will released three new volumes – pop-up, servos and sound – to flesh out the sequence as a a learning scaffold and remixable series. Jeannine Huffman is the author/creator for the servo project. We experimented with the materials and step-by-step she developed for exploring the basics of actuation, motion, and robotics with simple 2D paper figures.
About Jeannine Huffman: For the past three years Jeannine has taught at Teachers College of San Joaquin in the pre-service, intern, masters core and STEM tracks. She also serves as a mentor practicum supervisor for new teachers. For more on her work as a STEM educator and creative learning specialist, see her Weebly site where she has documented her explorations in paper circuitry and notebooking.
BUILDING CREATIVE + TECHNOLOGICAL CONFIDENCE WITH PAPER CIRCUITRY
May 7, 2016: Design Challenge Learning Institute, The Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose, CA We shared hands-on projects combining creativity, craft, and code, along with strategies for drawing girls more deeply into STEM subjects, developed their creative and technological confidence, and brought paper circuitry to your classrooms and learning programs. Building on a project we led at a past Girls Day @ The Tech, we discovered how you can use paper circuitry and Chibitronics circuit stickers to help girls (& boys!) express their creativity, design their dreams, and light up their goals, all while learning the basics of circuit design.
Presenters: NEXMAP Education Manager, Bridget Rigby and engineer and product designer, Anne Mayoral
SFUSD MAKER FAIRE
April 17, 2016: NEXMAP participated in the SFUSD mini-Maker Faire at Presidio Middle School @ 31st and Geary in San Francisco. Showcasing with our collaborators at Manylabs, we shared circuit templates that highlight AND/OR digital logic gates. More event info here.
EDUCATOR WORKSHOP @ KD BURKE SCHOOL FOR GIRLS
April 8, 2016: Building on our recent girls-in-STEM work, we led a Hack Your Notebook & Illuminate Your Thinking workshop at KD Burke School for Girls — part of their day-long professional development — program hosted by Studio Coordinator, Jenny Howland.
21C NOTEBOOKING ON THE ROAD WITH SFPL’S TECHMOBILE
April 4, 2016: The San Francisco Public Library Techmobile prototyped paper circuitry programs with circuit templates AND/OR logic gate templates developed for the last Girls Day @ The Tech program.
IN-SCHOOL | SYSTEMS THINKING @ ALT SCHOOL
January to March, 2016: David Cole worked with ELA and Science Teachers at Alt School’s Alamo site in San Francisco to support a three-month unit on “Systems.” In the first half of the unit, the class researched the branches of US government and created paper circuitry projects to highlight the relationships between executive, legislative and judicial branches. In the second half, they built personal robots with small motors, developed characters for their creations and used comic book storytelling techniques to create illuminated narratives about their work.
OPEN DATA / OPEN MINDS MANYLABS & NATIONAL WRITING PROJECT
March 30, 2016: David Cole and the NWP hosted a group of 25 lead educators to discuss the impact potential of 21st Century Notebooking and open data. Working with a team of designers from London responsible for the MyEdit conductive notepad — a prototype communications project from Google — representatives from NEXMAP, the Exploratorium, Maker Ed, The Tech Museum of Innovation, UCB Grad School of Ed, SRI — worked on program design ideas for supporting the upcoming Letters to the Next President program, a civic engagement and literacy project presented by KQED Education and the National Writing Project.
EDUCATOR WORKSHOP @ SAN MATEO COUNTY OFFICE OF EDUCATION
March 10, 2016: We led the STEM Center team through a paper circuitry activity that they’ll soon be introducing to their educators this summer as they kick-off a Maker initiative throughout 23 school districts, followed by workshops next school year in their new design studio at their county office. They’ll be providing Lecktrokits for a number of their schools to support this work in classrooms. See this tweet for a look at a STEM Center staff member with a sample project.
CONFERENCE: SXSWEDU 2016, AUSTIN, TX
March 2016: Our work was accepted this year at SXSWedu! Longtime collaborator Molly Adams, a high school teacher and National Writing Project Teacher Consultant from Waxahachie, TX lead a group of 40 through a "Hack Your Notebook — Illuminate Your Thinking" workshop. Molly shared her experiences bringing paper circuitry and creative learning to her classrooms and talked about the effect of the experience on her own teaching practice.
IN-SCHOOL | STEAMFEST! @ EAST BAY INNOVATION ACADEMY
February 1-8, 2016: After EBIA educators came to our Manylabs workshops, we developed a week-long paper circuitry + design thinking program for their STEAM Intersession. We partnered with Anne Mayoral, rocket scientist, toy designer, and Maker educator to lead 25 middle schoolers through the design process using paper circuitry as a tool for exploring and expressing ideas. The program built from simple prototyping on paper to pop-up circuits and blinking effects stickers, culminating in collaborative projects where they designed “delightful experiences” for the parent showcase. Delights ranged from a working operation game and a basketball game where where you see the ball fly from the shooter’s hands into the hoop as you press different switches, to a camping scene with a light-up tent and turkey roaster and a carnival scene with lights and pull-tab switches — and even a rotating ferris wheel switch!
PROGRAM YOUR PAGES: WORKING WITH MICROCONTROLLERS
January 23, 2016: The Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose, CA Participants had the chance to try out soldering to create durable circuit systems in their notebooks. We also looked at an open data prototype -- the Tide Notebook Project -- which integrates traditional artistic and scientific journaling with a wifi dev kit from Particle.io, and we discussed opportunities for hacking notebooks and creating fully connected teaching and learning experiences with paper and electronics. Presenter: Jeannine Huffman, STEM teacher and adjunct professor at Teachers College of San Joaquin, to explore the ATtiny85, and introductory Arduino sketches in part two of The Tech workshop program.
AKTEACH, KODIAK ALASKA
June 1-2, 2015: A keynote address and two-day educator training at 2015 Kodiak Island Virtual Learning Conference; K-12 teachers from across the state; follow-on implementation in 20 classrooms this coming school year.
SCIENTIFIC ADVENTURES FOR GIRLS
June 16 and July 7, 2015: Introduction to Paper Circuitry and 21st Century Notebooking with SAFG instructor, toy designer, and aerospace engineer, Anne Mayoral, at the CITRIS Invention Lab in the Engineering Dept. at UC Berkeley.
CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIES SYMPOSIUM #2, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NY, NY
June 19, 2015: NEXMAP partner David Cole gave a talk, Crafting with Electronics and 21st Century Notebooking: Re-imagining Literacy and Hands-on Learning,” and the Tide Notebook, developed by collaborator Natalie Freed, was included in the gallery exhibition, “New Gifts.”
“HACK YOUR NOTEBOOK,” BAY AREA WRITING PROJECT, SUMMER CAMP
July 16 – 20, 2015: “Hack Your Notebook,” a Teen Writing Camp, presented by the Bay Area Writing Project and Dr. Lanette Jimerson, Director of MUSE (Multicultural Urban Secondary Education) MAT in the Grad School of Education, UCB.
ILLUMINATE YOUR THINKING: AN INTRODUCTION TO PAPER CIRCUITRY
Oct. 24, 2015: The Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose, CA Using 3v batteries, clip leads, circuit stickers from Chibitronics, and a set of project card templates, participants learned by doing, completing personalized circuit systems, and considering the ways in which literacy, craft, science, and art come together in paper circuitry to bring 21st century competencies to a new level. We discussed interdisciplinary learning opportunities, standards alignment, and tips for bringing the experience to the classrooms and learning programs.
MANYLABS
Partner David Cole joined ManyLabs as a co-working participant where he’s focusing on the next prototype of the Tide Notebook. Funded by the Gordon Moore Foundation, Manylabs, is a space in the SOMA district of San Francisco “that brings together scientists and makers working on open tools for science.”
JUMPSTARTING THE STEAM-POWERED CLASSROOM
I/O and Sonoma County Office of Education delivered a day-long training at the district office in Santa Rosa, CA for 25 educators. The session was hosted by Casey Shea, a Mathematics instructor and the manager of the Maker Space at Analys High in Sebastopol and a teacher on special assignment, working with SCOE to develop it's maker programs.
Learn more about the program here.
NEXMAP GOES TO FINLAND
NEXMAP Board Member, Paul Kallmes was in Finland for Scifest 2015, an international Science Festival, part of UNESCO's International Year of Light. See this Flickr collection shared by Professor Pasi Vahimma, one of the festival organizers and the Director of the Institute of Photonics at the University of Eastern Finland.
FINDING YOUR MUSE
January 31, 2015: NEXMAP connected with Dr. Lanette Jimmerson and her MUSE students—Multicultural Urban Secondary English—at UC Berkeley. We shared 21c Notebooking with 15 her grad students working towards their teaching credentials. Follow the link here to see the animated GIF in action.
HACK YOUR NOTEBOOK DAY
July 9, 2014: We are hacking the notebook coast-to-coast! This summer, NEXMAP and CV2 are partnering with the National Writing Project and Educator Innovator to convene educators at schools, universities, museums and libraries across the country from Massachusetts to California to explore how 21st century notebooking can engage youth in STEM learning.
INSIDE/OUT GOES TO THE TECH
June 28, 2014: We spent a day of notebook hacking at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA. As part of our national Hack the Notebook Day, participants got a chance to explore paper circuitry and create a dedicated power source for their projects using simple materials.
MOUNTAIN VIEW PUBLIC LIBRARY
May 24, 2014: We hosted a maker table where participants made their own sci-fi inspired card using circuit stickers from Chibitronics.
WORKSHOP AT JFK UNIVERSITY
May 20, 2014: CV2 and NEXMAP gave a paper circuitry workshop at JFK University and discussed informal learning, program design, and building public school partnerships with the next generation of museum educators.
WORKSHOP AT SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY
April 29, 2014: CV2 and NEXMAP gave a paper circuitry workshop and discussed 21st Century notebooking and its implications for STEM-to-STEAM, literacy, systems thinking and inquiry-based learning with the next generation of art and science teachers.
OPEN MAKE: FLOW A THE TECH MUSEUM OF INNOVATION
April 26, 2014: Natalie Freed and NEXMAP's Jennifer Dick spoke about 21st Century notebooking at The Tech's Open Make: Flow "Meet the Makers" panel.
WORKSHOP AT EVERETT PUBLIC SCHOOLS
March 21, 2014: Inside/Out facilitated two workshops for teachers at Everett Public Schools, just north of Seattle. In the morning, we introduced paper circuitry to middle school math teachers and the afternoon with elementary school teachers.
INNOVATE, CREATE & DISCOVER
March 12, 2014: Inside/Out's had a Maker Station to explore paper circuitry at the San José Public Library, which is working to foster the spirit of the maker culture, partnering with people and companies in Silicon Valley, to continue providing you with library services which will inspire you to Innovate, Create, and Discover. Join
DIGITAL MEDIA & LEARNING 2014 CONFERENCE
March 8, 2014: Boston, MA DML2014 Connecting Practices We explored how the practice of notebooking helps youth, in school and out, develop essential cross-disciplinary skills for today’s world and transforms the notebook from “a thing I have to do for my teacher” to “a tool I use for myself to solve problems and create things.” Because collaboration and sharing are essential elements to developing ideas, we experimented with a prototype notebook and notification system that uses Bluetooth, LEDs and Wi-Fi networks to make real-time connections between online, digital content and analog, personal content in a journal or sketchbook.
NATIONAL WRITING PROJECT ANNUAL MEETING
November 21, 2013: Boston, MA - NEXMAP's Inside/Out programming co-presented a paper circuitry workshop in partnership with the National Writing Project and Jie Qi of the MIT Media Lab.