Nina Shiner wants to be a web designer

By Kathy Childs

Middle schooler, Nina Shiner, is on a quest to create the ultimate yoga website for kids featuring her hand-drawn pal, Rosie. But she has a problem. How does she lift her drawings out of her sketchbook and into a computer? When her parents send her off to a STEM boarding school to learn, Nina is horrified. After all, what could computer programming and science gadgets have to do with her beloved yoga? Nina reluctantly attends P. Design, a Silicon Valley Technology Charter School, after she’s promised the school can help bring Rosie from a piece of paper to the screen—and embarks on the adventure of a lifetime. Alongside a host of new friends—including unicorn-loving Jericka Reynolds, brilliant robot builder Brad McNealy, and Josh Chello, a surfer dude with mood swings—she learns what technology can really do. When a key project mysteriously disappears, it’s up to Nina and her friends to track down the thief. On a twisting technological journey to sort out the truth, Nina ultimately experiences the precious gift of knowing thyself.

Best of all, Nina does indeed learn to animate Rosie in SCRATCH—a free programming language, developed and supported by the MIT Media Lab. SCRATCH is a safe, online community where children can create their own interactive stories, games, and animations. See Nina's animation of Rosie in the SCRATCH link provided at the end of the book.

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Launch Cycle

By John Spencer

John Spencer’s (2016) LAUNCH Cycle is a great framework, centered in design thinking, for guiding both teachers and students to take an idea and seeing it through to a final product in a classroom. His LAUNCH Cycle is not formulaic and does not require teachers to teach one step than another. Instead, it is a cyclical process that makes “creativity an authentic experience” in classrooms (Spencer, 2016, p. 24).

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Worlds of Making: Best Practices for Establishing a Makerspace for Your School

By Laura Fleming

Get the nuts and bolts on imagining, planning, creating, and managing a cutting-edge Makerspace for your school community. Nationally recognized expert Laura Fleming provides all the answers in this breakthrough guide. From inception through implementation, you’ll find invaluable guidance for creating a vibrant Makerspace on any budget. Practical strategies and anecdotal examples help you:

• Create an action plan for your own personalized Makerspace
• Align activities to standards
• Showcase student creations

Use this must-have guide to painlessly build a robust, unique learning environment that puts learning back in the hands of your students!

Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

By Sylvia Libow Martinez

Join the maker movement!
There’s a technological and creative revolution underway. Amazing new tools, materials and skills turn us all into makers. Using technology to make, repair or customize the things we need brings engineering, design and computer science to the masses. Fortunately for educators, this maker movement overlaps with the natural inclinations of children and the power of learning by doing. The active learner is at the center of the learning process, amplifying the best traditions of progressive education. This book helps educators bring the exciting opportunities of the maker movement to every classroom.

In this practical guide, Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager provide K-12 educators with the how, why, and cool stuff that supports making in the classroom, library, makerspace, or anywhere learners learn.

Your Starter Guide to Makerspaces (The Nerdy Teacher Presents) (Volume 1)

By Nicholas Provenzano

Schools around the country are designing maker spaces to spark creativity. Students learn best when they are able to create and tinker and make. But how do you even begin when there are so many terms floating around? This book provides a fun, practical, and approachable framework for any teacher curious about getting started with maker spaces. I've never had so much fun reading a professional book, ever. Somehow each chapter is equal parts hilarious, gleeful, inspiring and practical. I would recommend to this every educator I know and even parents and students. This is a book you can come back to again and again to laugh learn and make each time in a new way. - Jennie Magiera, Educator and Author of Courageous Edventures Your Starter Guide To Makerspaces makes any Hufflepuff feel like they can tackle the maker movement with the brains of a Ravenclaw, confidence of a Gryffindor, and cleverness of a Slytherin. Emily Gover - Edtech Nerd & Librarian

 The Genius Hour Guidebook: Fostering Passion, Wonder, and Inquiry in the Classroom

By Denise Krebs and Gallit Zvi

Promote your students’ creativity and get them excited about learning! In this practical new book, authors Denise Krebs and Gallit Zvi show you how to implement Genius Hour, a time when students can develop their own inquiry-based projects around their passions and take ownership of their work. Brought to you by MiddleWeb and Routledge Eye On Education, the book takes you step-by-step through planning and teaching Genius Hour. You’ll learn how to guide your students as they:

• Develop inquiry questions based on their interests;

• Conduct research to learn more about their topic of choice;

• Create presentations to teach their fellow students in creative ways; and

• Present their finished product for a final assessment.

At the end of the book, you’ll find handy FAQs and ready-made lessons and resources. In addition, a companion website, www.geniushourguide.org, offers bonus materials and regular updates to support you as you implement Genius Hour in your own classroom.

The Art of Tinkering

By Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich  

The Art of Tinkering is a collection of exhibits, artwork, and projects that celebrate a whole new way to learn, in which people create their own knowledge through making and doing, working with readily available materials, getting their hands dirty, collaborating with others, problem-solving in the most fun sense of the word, and, yes, oftentimes failing and bouncing back from getting stuck.

The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkerers

By Mark Hatch

The Maker Movement Manifesto takes you deep into the movement. Hatch describes the remarkable technologies and tools now accessible to you and shares stories of how ordinary people have devised extraordinary products, giving rise to successful new business ventures. He explains how economic upheavals are paving the way for individuals to create, innovate, make a fortune--and even drive positive societal change--with nothing more than their own creativity and some hard work.

It's all occurring right now, all around the world--and possibly in your own neighborhood.

The creative spirit lives inside every human being. We are all makers. Whether you're a banker, lawyer, teacher, tradesman, or politician, you can play an important role in the Maker society.

So fire up your imagination, read The Maker Movement Manifesto--and start creating!