Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Many school libraries are interested in making the shift from passively providing reading and research material to actively facilitating in STEM skills development and student creativity. These efforts involve everything from traditional arts and crafts to programming, robotics, and 3D printing. Roquet explains how his K–8 library launched a successful makerspace program that looks beyond buzzy educational toys and acts as a platform to support all kinds of student creativity and production using physical and digital media. This program seeks to support individual student interests while building skill sets that support 21st-century literacies and engaged citizenship— not just skills that lead to jobs in the technology sector. Uhlmann discusses the process of needs assessment, program planning, purchasing equipment, reconfiguring a space, and program rollout and promotion for a digital memory lab makerspace in a school library environment.