While policymakers, thinktanks, researchers and educators in the US are working overtime to fuel interest - and grow the pipeline - in STEM (Science, Engineering, Technology & Math) subjects, there is quiet movement that's gaining a foothold in homes and cities across the country (OK, maybe it's not-so-quiet :-)). It's referred to by many different names, but Maker Movement is perhaps most widely used, and describes well this cult of DIYers. It's evidenced in the increasingly popular Maker Faires across the country, a growing interest in 'fablabs', and websites such as 'Instructables' and magazines such as 'MAKE'.

Mike Eisenberg, who co-heads the Craft Technology Group (with his wife, Ann) at UC, Boulder, kicked off his keynote with images and videos of some of the tools and devices used in his lab as well as artifacts crafted with those tools. These included, among others, linkages made from laser cutters, 3D Möbius strips, fractal trees, plush "bots", hypergami creations, engineered artifacts inspired by Da Vinci's notebooks and sketches, as well as Leah Buechley's "computational art & craft" projects using the Lilypad Arduino on fabric and paper. Eisenberg underscored the need for K-12 education to stress on designing content-rich activities as opposed to skill building, focusing on kids' cultures and interests beyond the classroom, and giving children the opportunity to make and build by blending physical and computational media. He spoke at length about three "upheavals" in education that were needed to achieve these goals. 

• Upheaval #1: Looking at Children's Lives i.e. Anthropology (or "lived lives, not disembodied minds") as a Foundation for Design
• Upheaval #2: Dissolving the "Vocational/Liberal Arts" Divide - viewing humans as intergrated personalities, and therefore not "manual arts" and "liberal arts" as separate in a foundation of curriculum
• Upheaval #3: Rethinking Technology Beyond the Individual Device as 'Ecosystems of devices' or ecologies, not devices as a structure for thinking about kids' technology.
   

After Mike Eisenberg's thought-provoking address came Mark Gross's entertaining presentation on 'design, making & creativity' framed creatively with the use of wordles and visual thesaurus definitions of these terms and ideas commonly related to them. Mark shared a bunch of cool videos that described and demo'ed projects by his students from the courses he teaches at CMU - 'Digital Fabrication' and 'Making Things Interact'. The projects included not just great artifacts fabricated with physical and computation media but also cool new technologies that push the frontiers of fabrication for all such as SketchChair, a flat-pack furniture design and construction kit, a Multi-Touch Virtual 3D Clay for the iPad, software that exports 3D geometry to a 3D-printer-ready STL file, and many others. Mark ended his presentation with a demonstration of Cubelets as well as another very cool robotics kit in the pipeline.

Questions in the panel session that followed these scintillating talks dwelt largely on the practical aspects of getting the attention of policy-makers and VCs, buy-in from teachers, as well as other ground issues related to taking such ideas to scale and as curricula into schools. Both speakers acknowledged the challenges with such attempts in the short term, and ended with the hope that there will be enough of a groundswell through individual pockets of activity around the Maker and Fablab movements to impact a substantial number of kids and get them excited about tinkering and making and creating objects and tangible interfaces driven by their personal passions and interests.