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Today's lecture included many hands-on based activities to introduce us to the maker movement. It was interesting to see how the maker culture emphasises on the concept of learning through doing, for example; building, coding, sewing and crafting, woodwork. We can see that this interactive process is a practical approach and is something that can be very benefitting to our students' learning experiences.
Check out the first "making" we did of the Little Bits synthesisers - it really took us into the mechanics of how actually synthesisers work in the flesh! I've got to be honest though, these things looked so foreign to me but there sure was some helpful scaffolding provided by James (first playing around with speaker, battery and oscillator, before connecting the rest) which made things so much easier!
One very interesting mini project I came across is the electronic organ kit (from the "Short Circuits Volume 2"). I think this is a great project for integrated learning, as it combines science in the process to create something musical. It includes detailed instructions with illustrated diagrams so is easy to follow and make quite independently.
Another very handy tool I came across is the electric paint by Bare Conductive.
Check out the video below to see how the paint works - it would be a useful tool for visual and aural learning combined in the music classroom.
Where these activities are student centred and teachers usually are as seen "behind the scenes" facilitators, the maker movement movement can somewhat be linked between informal learning and a project based style of learning.