Maker March

This month in class is "Maker March."
Our motto: We are all makers. Our goal: create a maker project with our content-area groups.

Not sure what I'm talking about when I refer to "makers"? (Don't worry, I had no idea what this meant before arriving to class last Thursday.) These two articles from Time and Forbes give some background on maker culture and the maker movement.

On Thursday each group started brainstorming to think of what project they would work towards creating during this month. Working on this project in groups definitely has its pros and cons. When we first started our brainstorming session, everyone in my group was pretty confused. It took a while to start the flow of any ideas, especially since we weren't sure if we wanted to take the project in a SLP direction or not. I think that was one of the cons about being in a group, that it took longer to get any ideas going. It can be difficult to share ideas in their earliest stages to a group, when they might sound stupid or not be fully formed. But once we had some ideas out there, it was beneficial to have a group to bounce these ideas around in. We could build off of the creativity of other group members. Our combined efforts and thoughts had the potential to spark more creativity than if it was just one person. It was definitely helpful to have four minds working together. However, that could also be detrimental when we were not all on the same page. Even though we all on the same page with the basic idea of what we would be making (a board game), we all had different visions of what exactly that would look like. We had to narrow down ideas and get specific to get on the same page. Everyone believes in their mental image of what the game should look like, so it can be frustrating when that does not end up in the final group image. The project could start to turn in a different way than what you originally anticipated, and that is what I struggled with most on Thursday.
I really like the idea that my group came up with, which is to create a virtual world game that is accessible to everyone, especially people with different physical impairments that would normally exclude them from playing this type of game. Even if it were an individual assignment, I would probably want to pursue the idea of a game that is accessible to all students with a wide range of disabilities, like the students I will be working with in therapy. However, I would have been interested in a more simple version of what we are creating. The virtual world is great, but not something we have the knowledge to actually come anywhere near creating a working version of. I would pursue the less high-tech route of adapting a classic board game to be controlled by a child's switch that they already use (if they do not have good fine motor skills). I think this would be really interesting because while I have no knowledge of how to actually create this, I think it is something I could realistically figure out (with a lot of help). It would feel really cool to have a semi-working creation at the end of the month.

These are my thoughts after week 1 of Maker March. We've done a lot of exploring already, but my group still has a long way to go and a lot more to discover. I'll keep you posted on our progress and discoveries as the month goes on!