Makerspace

Education is about living healthy in our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and within our environment. A wellness makerspace provides opportunities for personal development and learning through the making of projects that encourage healthy behavior throughout all life stages. Healthy individuals promote healthier communities.

A wellness makerspace explores building a healthy body through movement- walking, cardio activities, weight lifting, free weights, flexibility training and relaxation and strengthening exercises including yoga, pilates, kickboxing, and exercise bootcamps. Students gain knowledge about preparation for a lifetime of fitness and experience the fun of social exercising. Making in a wellness makerspace includes student creation of motivational posters that connect movement with desired fitness levels, data charts of heart rate monitoring, steps walked, and calories burned achieved.
Students explore the difference between sedentary sitting and walking, running, swimming and biking by keeping exercise and calorie logs. In the wellness makerspace, students study the systems of the body- muscles, tendons, skeletons. Health and nutrition informs students dietary choices. The wellness makerspace needs natural light and access to outdoor activities. Inside, the space needs a sports floor, audio system, storage, and mirrors with access to water for hydration and adjacency to restrooms and locker rooms. Minimal exercise equipment includes resistance machines, stairmasters, rowers, ellipticals, and stationary bikes, free weights, mats, and exercise balls.

Create three wellness posters or a wall mural for your wellness makerspace showing healthy ways of moving.

Do you like to cook? Everyone everywhere needs food to live. Many careers are associated with producing, preparing and managing foods and food retail and restaurants. A culinary makerspace offers opportunities to grow food and practice cleaning, cutting, storing and preparing meals. From recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and desert, cooking shows model best practices and deliver healthy and delicious foods. Working with vegetables, fruits, meat, poultry, fish and baked goods, the Cooking Channel and other online programs share professional practices of working in the food service industry. A culinary makerspace uses an industrial kitchen complete with work surfaces and sinks, cook tops, ovens, a refrigerator, a freezer, a dishwasher, grill, mixers, and commercial steamer and slicer. In addition, sets of knives, mixing bowls, baking dishes and pans, cook top skillets, pans and double boilers with lids are needed for cooking, baking and cooling. In addition, a complete service of dishes, glasses, flat ware and linen provide practice in table setting and service. A teaching kitchen also uses media screens to watch cooking programs and for students to video themselves explaining the process of making meals! Planning an industrial kitchen involves measuring. From the appliances to the widths, lengths and heights of the work surfaces, all of the parts need to be organized efficiently to facilitate a seemingly effortless work flow. In industrial kitchens one finds temperature controlled storage areas, prep areas, cooking areas, and service areas. Collect sizes for everything you want in your culinary makerspace. Pick a classroom or rooms that you will convert. Diagram the work flow of food in, table service out, and waste and clean-up.

Get cooking!

An Engineering Makerspace combines art, science and design in exploration of how the world works and how it might work. Designers research, test ideas, and propose new conditions. They diagram, map, test and model strategies to effect change. Designers work individually and in groups. They present ideas at many stages of the design process to each other and to community members to get feedback. Designers become digitally fluent and able to use media to write, visualize, and model. Designers study materials, mock up full scale prototypes, draw and build. A Design lab uses shops for fabrication. From studio tables to model display to pin up areas, labs need individual work space as well as common critique areas. Visit a design school in your city and take notes of what is included in design labs. Take a single classroom with typical desks and make it a designlab!

Makerspaces can be planned inside a school and outside around a school campus. What opportunities can a school provide for learning outside? What making needs are needed? Can outside spaces support learning inside?
Capture an aerial view of your campus and imagine makerspaces all around!