seminar
Re-Crafting the Maker Movement with Electronic Textiles
The Maker Movement is expanding from maker fairs, fabrication labs, and community organizations into classrooms and school maker spaces. While maker activities provide new opportunities for learning, they also promote stereotypes about makers and making. Electronic textiles are textile artifacts embedded with interactive electronics challenge that these stereotypes by connecting traditionally more feminine activities of crafts with more traditionally male activities of circuitry and computing. In my talk, I will present examples from Stitching the Loop, a curriculum using electronic textiles within high school computer science classrooms, and discuss how electronic textiles provide new opportunities for learning about computer science in breaking down barriers to computing.
The Maker Movement is expanding from maker fairs, fabrication labs, and community organizations into classrooms and school maker spaces. While maker activities provide new opportunities for learning, they also promote stereotypes about makers and making. Electronic textiles are textile artifacts embedded with interactive electronics challenge that these stereotypes connecting traditionally more feminine activities of crafts with more traditionally male activities of circuitry and computing. In my talk, I will present examples from Stitching the Loop, a curriculum using electronic textiles within high school computer science classrooms, and discuss how electronic textiles provide new opportunities for learning about computer science in breaking down barriers to computing.
Yasmin Kafai is the Lori and Michael Milken President's Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Teaching, Learning and Leadership division at the Graduate School of Education. She is a researcher and developer of tools, communities, and materials to promote computational participation, crafting, and creativity across K-16. Her book monographs include Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming (The MIT Press, 2014; available in Chinese by Dongbin University Press in May 2019) and editions such as the upcoming Constructionism in Context: The Art, Theory, and Practice of Learning Designs (2019, The MIT Press). She co-authored the 2010 "National Educational Technology Plan for the US Department of Education and the 2018 Priming the Computer Science Teacher Education Pump reports. Kafai earned doctorate in education from Harvard University while working with Seymour Papert at the MIT Media Lab. She is an elected fellow of the American Educational Research Association and the International Society for the Learning Sciences.