Newark Young Makers
We want to inspire a new generation of Makers in Newark, NJ. Our Young Makers program provides project-based physical computing classes for students in Newark. The program completed its pilot year in 2011, in collaboration with the Big Picture Learning Network, a nationwide educational organization that seeks to transform education though individualized learning.
Young Makers connects STEM professionals directly with students, providing lessons in problem-solving, critical thinking, and working with open-source tools. It encourages students to tinker and experiment while developing 21st Century workforce skills.
Most importantly, the Young Makers project empowers students with the confidence to use their STEM skills to improve their communities and their lives.
About You
About You
First Name
Isaac
Last Name
Kestenbaum
About Your Organization
Organization Name
STEM2GETHER
Organization Website
Organization Phone
718-841-7327
Organization Address
200 Court Street, 4R
Organization Country
United States, NY, Kings County
Country where this project is creating social impact
United States, NJ, Essex County
Is your organization a
For‐profit
How long has your organization been operating?
1‐5 years
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Innovation
Entry Form title
Newark Young Makers
What change do you want to bring to the world?
We want to inspire a new generation of Makers in Newark, NJ. Our Young Makers program provides project-based physical computing classes for students in Newark. The program completed its pilot year in 2011, in collaboration with the Big Picture Learning Network, a nationwide educational organization that seeks to transform education though individualized learning.
Young Makers connects STEM professionals directly with students, providing lessons in problem-solving, critical thinking, and working with open-source tools. It encourages students to tinker and experiment while developing 21st Century workforce skills.
Most importantly, the Young Makers project empowers students with the confidence to use their STEM skills to improve their communities and their lives.
What are the primary activities of your project?
The Young Makers project works closely with schools to develop and implement long-term, sustainable in-school and academic-enrichment courses based around computational thinking and digital fabrication technologies, while providing career exploration in STEM fields. The program allows students to work directly and regularly with STEM professionals over the course of the school year.
In addition to working with traditional hand tools, students also learn about how the physical world interacts with the virtual world through electronics and physical computing. Students have extensive input about the projects they pursue - whether it's making their own video games, building robots, or creating interactive clothing, students gain a common set of skills that they can share with their peers. Through tinkering and making, participants develop their problem-solving and computational thinking abilities.
In the 2012 school year, we hope to expand the Young Makers project by building curriculum around an open-source 3D desktop printer, such as a MakerBot. This will remarkably enhance the Young Makers program, offering students the chance to create even more ambitious and complex projects, while gaining experience with three-dimensional modeling and desktop fabrication. The MakerBot will also be a great asset to teachers and can be incorporated into standards-based curriculum throughout the school day.
What is innovative about your initiative? How is it a new contribution to the field?
It has been shown that urban minority students are less likely to enter STEM careers. This is especially true in Newark, where few programs encourage informal, hands-on engagement with science and technology. Additionally, with low graduation rates and systematic unemployment, students do not benefit from professional mentors and lack the guidance required to purse a career in a STEM field.
Young Makers addresses this head-on by bringing digital fabrication technologies directly to these students. It takes the abstract concepts of science, engineering and mathematics and makes them tangible. The project gives students experience in industrial design, systematic thinking, programming and prototyping by allowing them to work with their hands - to put things together and take them apart.
It also provides a connection between schools and the burgeoning Make movement, which allows industry professionals to work directly with underserved students. The uniqueness of our cooperative model allows our Maker Mentors to work for STEM2GETHER on a "part-time" basis over a "long-term" period of time. In other words, our innovative management structure adapts to the needs of our Maker Mentors, similar to how our curriculum adapts to the interests and abilities of our students.
There are similar programs in New York, including many that STEM2GETHER has collaborated on, but the implementation is often cost-prohibitive. Because Newark Young Makers uses open-source technologies, it is more affordable, especially for schools with fewer resources.
What stage is your project in?
Operating for 1‐5 years
Tell us about the community that you engage? eg. economic conditions, political structures, norms and values, demographic trends, history, and experience with engagement efforts.
Newark, New Jersey is troubled. Long plagued with high crime, it often tops lists of most-dangerous cities and as of 2010 was the 23rd most-dangerous city in the country. Nearly 25% of Newark's residents live below the poverty line, and 33% of its children live in poverty.
Its educational system is also plagued. Newark's public schools are consistently among the state's lowest-performing, and nearly a third of its residents did not complete high school.
Its population is roughly 50% African-American and 30% Latino, both populations that are less likely to have a positive relationship with STEM fields.
The staff of STEM2GETHER have worked in the community of Newark for the last 5 years, running programs in Lego robotics and technological education and fabrication - such as the Young Makers project. We are very familiar with Newark and its needs, and have strong existing relationships with many of its teachers and schools, including the newest Newark Big Picture School, S.T.E.A.M. Academy, which is slated to open in fall 2012.
Share the story of the founder and what inspired the founder to start this project
STEM2GETHER is an educational services cooperative based in New York, New York; its founding members include Corbett Beder and Jon Santiago, known for founding GreenFab, a National Science Foundation-funded program in the South Bronx that taught sustainable green design through digital fabrication, engineering and technology. They are both inspired by the power of technical hands-on learning to positively transform the lives of young people.
Prior to co-founding STEM2GETHER, Corbett was the Senior Director of Research & Development at Vision Education & Media, an academic enrichment organization that provided after school programs and curriculum development in science and technology. For the past eight years, his projects have included teaching high school digital video, middle school video game design, and LEGO Robotics throughout the New York and New Jersey area.
Jon Santiago graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) where he worked with the FabLab program, a global initiative to bring digital fabrication laboratories to communities around the world. After leaving MIT he started a FabLab in the South Bronx, and co-created the GreenFab program. He is a member of the adjunct faculty of the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, where he teaches in the Integrated Digital Media department. As a member of the NYC Resistor hackerspace in Downtown Brooklyn, he also teaches electronics and programming classes to beginners and enthusiasts.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
Please describe how your project has been successful and how that success is measured
The Young Makers project's success can be measured concretely through tracking school attendance and after-school attendance. We can also measure success through students' academic performance.
Additionally, we draw on a great deal of compelling anecdotal evidence, including positive feedback from students, many of whom stay late or work on their projects during off-hours.
Lastly, the project builds off the success of GreenFab, an NSF-funded program that clearly proved the connection between hands-on STEM education and improved academic performance.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
101-1,000
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
1,001-10,000
How will your project evolve over the next three years?
The project is already poised to expand to other Big Picture Network Schools, beginning with the newest Newark Big Picture School, S.T.E.A.M. Academy, opening in Fall 2012.
The Young Makers project will also offer Professional Development for teachers, and offer internships and paid positions for students.
The project and its curriculum can serve as a template that can be customized to uniquely fit the needs of any school. With a relatively inexpensive start-up cost and overhead, the Young Makers Project could spread throughout Newark, and far beyond.
Sustainability
What barriers might hinder the success of your project and how do you plan to overcome them?
A major barrier is the view - held by some - that the constructivist movement has little academic value, and that students would be better served sticking to standardized lesson plans.
This is an opinion that STEM2GETHER has long been able to counter by ensuring that our constructivist approaches are fully integrated into the school - both in daytime activities and academic enrichment activities.
STEM2GETHER has also piloted programs that show the connection between hands-on, project-based learning and academic success. And STEM2GETHER's partnership with the Big Picture Learning Network provides a network of over 60 schools that can be used for leverage.
A more mundane concern is lack of funding for supplies and materials as the program grows - a barrier that STEM2GETHER plans to overcome by running successful and popular programs.
Tell us about your partnerships
STEM2GETHER works closely with The Big Picture Learning Network, a network of more than 60 schools, including two in Newark, dedicated to changing education by sustaining innovative and personal learning environments. At the core of Big Picture Learning’s mission is a commitment to equity for all students, especially underserved urban students.
STEM2GETHER is also a partner with MakerBot Industries. We have developed K-12 curriculum for MakerBot and have helped run professional development workshops for teachers at MakerBot's headquarters.
Newark Young Makers is also an informal partnership with the Make Magazine and Maker Faire community.
Current annual budget of project, in US dollars
$50,001‐100,000
Explain your selections
The Newark Young Makers program has been supported by the Big Picture Network with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Past STEM2GETHER projects have been funded by the Newark School system, The National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Individual STEM2GETHER members each made a small one-time donation towards the collective's start-up cost, and we also receive many in-kind donations from professionals in STEM fields.
How do you plan to strengthen your project in the next three years?
STEM2GETHER will strengthen the Young Makers project by expanding it into other schools both in New Jersey and in the New York City region. Additionally, STEM2GETHER will continue to build on its existing relationships with the Big Picture Learning Network and MakerBot Industries.
We also plan to lead professional development workshops for teachers, and to build in an entrepreneurial element to the program, wherein students can market and sell their creations for profit.
Partnerships and Accountability
Please tell us more about how your partnership was formed and how it functions. What specific role does each partner play? What unique resources does each partner bring to the initiative?
STEM2GETHER's partnership with Big Picture Schools grew out of our work with GreenFab in the South Bronx. The Big Picture Network provides a network of other schools that STEM2GETHER can partner with, and provide classroom management support. We provide quality hands-on programming for their students and get them interested in STEM careers. Big Picture and STEM2GETHER share similar core values, primarily that students learn best by doing rather than being lectured to.
STEM2GETHER also works closely with Dale Dougherty , co-founder of O'Reilly, Make Magazine, and Maker Faire. Our partnership grew from our participation in Maker Faire as presenters, and being part of the Maker movement. Our partnership with MakerBot Industries grew from working together at NYC Resistor, a technology collective in Downtown Brooklyn. We help them get their cutting-edge machines in schools, and they give us incredible technical support.
How are you building in accountability for students' successful STEM learning outcomes? Please provide a summary and examples.
STEM2GETHER will survey students about their attitudes towards STEM issues and systems at the beginning and end of each semester. The questions focus on their experience of team work, collaboration and mentoring, and on their understanding of the inquiry process. Students are asked to complete weekly short, structured logs in which they describe insights about specific concepts learned during the program.
Toward the end of each semester and at the end of the summer program, students are asked to describe a futuristic technology they imagine will be available to do the work of a profession with which they have become acquainted in the program. This projective task asks them to provide a schematic drawing, label it and describe the function (but not necessarily the process) of their “invention” as if they were submitting an application for a patent.
Assessments to gauge the students’ learning of each major component of the curriculum are built into the program and will be used to track student learning relevant to appropriate standards (i.e., NETS Technology, BIG 6 Literacy, NSTA National Science, and 21st Century Learning).
Needs
Investment, Human Resources/Talent.
Please use this space to elaborate on your selection above and/or to add needs that may not be listed.
As a relatively young organization, STEM2GETHER is in greatest need of investment and funding.
Offers
Collaboration/Networking, Innovation/Ideas, Mentorship.
Please use this space to elaborate on your selection above and/or to add offers that may not be listed.
As a cooperative, one of STEM2GETHER's core values is being open to many types of collaborations and partnerships.
 | 94 weeks ago Isaac Kestenbaum updated this Competition Entry. |
| 94 weeks ago Isaac Kestenbaum updated this Competition Entry. |
| 94 weeks ago Isaac Kestenbaum updated this Competition Entry. |
| 94 weeks ago Isaac Kestenbaum updated this Competition Entry. |
| 94 weeks ago Isaac Kestenbaum updated this Competition Entry. |
| 94 weeks ago Isaac Kestenbaum updated this Competition Entry. |
| 94 weeks ago Isaac Kestenbaum updated this Competition Entry. |
| 94 weeks ago Isaac Kestenbaum updated this Competition Entry. |
| 94 weeks ago Isaac Kestenbaum updated this Competition Entry. |
| 95 weeks ago Isaac Kestenbaum updated this Competition Entry. |
