In a recent post, I wrote about our advance here at St. Gregory into the world of Fab Labs and Makerbots, marked by the recent arrival of our new 3D printer.    Below are three videos further exploring and demonstrating the value of fablabs, the first a TEDx talk by Stanford Professor Paulo Blikstein, and the 2 others showcasing Fablab activities at a very fine school near Stanford, Castilleja School.

In education, we don’t know what to give up: We want to teach new skills but not give anything up from the past.   One of the greatest things about Apple is that they know what to give up.

We need to make big changes not only in the means, the media of education, but the content of education.

A lot of skills we teach in schools now are obsolete… It is amazing that school is not doing anything more to teach us about science and technology around us.

You can’t teach sports unless you have a gym;  it is the same idea for 2st century skills, if we want to teach innovation, critical thinking, deep understanding of science and technology– if you don’t have a place to teach those skills you can’t really do a good job.

We can’t assess new skills with a pencil and paper test, just as we couldn’t assess swimming skills without a pool.

[Let’s help students so] they are not looking at tech as something magical but looking at tech and Science as a tool that can change the lives of others, which is the fundamental skill we need to develop in these [Fab] lives and in education in general.

Below (after the jump-“more”) are the Castilleja videos, provided me courtesy of the Castilleja Head of School, Nanci Kauffmann.  The Castilleja faculty is shown spending a great day inside their own school’s Fab lab, and experiencing themselves the learning experience and the thrill of discovery and invention these spaces, and these kind of learning activities, can provide.

It certainly sparks for me the wish to do the same here at St. Gregory, bringing our faculty into our Fab lab space for a day or half-day.   Look for our matching video sometime before the end of the year.

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