BBN School

New Models for Education: Maker Faire and the Young Makers Program

Maker Faire also captures something about the potential for a new direction in education

our optimism for making as a way to learn

fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

In most schools, memorization is mistaken for learning. Most of what is remembered is remembered only for a short time, but then is quickly forgotten.

 A primary obligation of 21st century teachers is to open the doors to 24/7 learning, helping students understand that they can access education from virtually anywhere, at any time.

For years school curriculums have emphasized top-down instruction, especially for topics like math and science. Learn the rules first — the theorems, the order of operations, Newton’s laws — then make a run at the problem list at the end of the chapter. Yet recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules: gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem they’re up against. Like the ballplayer who can “read” pitches early, or the chess master who “sees” the best move, they’ve developed a great eye.

Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of this same bottom-up ability, called perceptual learning