Welcome to Maker Month!

How are “makers” transforming education? What can children learn better through projects than from a classroom setting? If a student learns to construct a bicycle, does she still need to take a traditional physics class? Who are the stars of this movement? What are its challenges or downsides?

At Bright, we’ve been interested in maker education, or project-based learning, for months. We thought it might be fun to focus on it for a few weeks and see what we could learn.

We kicked things off yesterday with a profile of The Crucible, a warehouse in Oakland, California where kids learn about industrial arts. In the coming weeks, we’ll be looking at maker camps, project-based learning in religious schools, diversity in the maker movement, and much more. We’ll be hearing from teachers who have tried to implement these principles in their classroom.

And we’d love to hear from you! Do you have an opinion or experience with maker education? Share your story on Medium using the tag “Maker Month” and I might choose to feature it in Bright. You can tweet your story at me (@sarika008) to make sure I see it.

On another note, I hope you all get a chance to check out the stories of teens in New Orleans. To honor the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, instead of getting a journalist to talk about the progress the city has made in education, we handed the microphone over to young people who are living it today.

They shared reflections on the storm, their lives today, and their impressions of school. My favorite piece is from Brevin’s story:

The good thing to me about New Orleans is it makes you realize that life is what you make of it. I don’t know how to explain it. I feel like New Orleans gives you a real view on life. In one big little city it shows you the world. You go through so many different trials and errors at a young age that when you become at a certain level or certain age, you get a better, deeper view on life.