Aquaponics idea
Principles and practices
An examination of the philosophy and politics in Fab.
The idea of genuine inquiry among students struck a chord with me , and the idea of students answering unasked questions lies at the heart of education.Presenting DF as an urban infrastructure and empowering consumers to be be creative and eliminate the consumer suppy chains seemed quite radical, but perhaps that is what is happening. #DF as a human right?
Useful Introduction to the academy, the network and the hopes of the founders.
Not useful
The expectation to have an overview of 16 weeks of diverse units from the start does not appear constructive or commensurate with the mission of the academy. A lot of non-productive time with technical difficulties and anecdotes.Suggestions
Lesson preparation. Prepared slides not random googling of images and information. Keep anecdotes relevant. Ensure the learning objective is always at the forefront of the content being delivered.ASGMT:plan and sketch a potential final project
The assignment went through many iterations. My first idea was aquaponics. The reason for this was my experience of a purchased aquaponics system installed in a school I worked at in Switzerland. The students had minimal input into the build of this device and hence the learning from it was minimal. The example from FabAcademy2017 made me think that a student built unit would give them much greater insights into the ideas of urban farming as well as the delicate nature of ecosystems. This, however appeared to be too closely related to the project from last year.
My next train of thought was an interactive birdhouse, that took pictures of birds that come to feed at it.(Panama is an ornithologists dream and has hundreds of species of both endemic and migratory birds)
Birdhouse idea
I think this is still a worthwhile project, but as a science teacher a little sceptical of the learning opportunities for students. The next thought I had was this question "How would Galileo have built his inclined plane experiment if he had had access to a FabLab?" Actually I think this question applied to any of the machine inventions of antiquity would provide some interesting results.Galileos inclined plane Expt
I am sure most people are aware of this experiment and many students have repeated the same in an attempt to measure the force of gravity. Again though I am not sure of its use and there are obviously much more accurate ways to measure the force of gravity today.