Invent To Learn Quotes

“the AUP is the only communication from school to home about the vision of technology use, and yet, it’s a negative document, full of complex legalese and threats of punishment. If that’s the only message parents get from your school about technology, you are missing an opportunity to set the bar high and share your vision.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Too many times within the constraints of school students are taught that there is only one correct answer, or perhaps that there isn’t enough time to really explore many other possibilities. It is crucial to learning to have space for invention and innovation.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Electronics is central to our lives but disappeared from our consciousness.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it. — Alan Kay”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Makerspace Playbook Contains ideas for makerspace safety and rules.  Project Storage”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“The scientific method may work for testing a guess about how the world works, but it is not applicable to things that don’t yet exist.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“When people learn, they construct knowledge based on what they already know and have experienced. This is context specific and different for each person.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“As Seymour Papert says, “You can’t think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.” (Papert, 2005)”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Talking and working with others is one of the best ways to cement new knowledge.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Knowledge does not result from receipt of information transmitted by someone else without the learner undergoing an internal process of sense making. Piaget also called for interdisciplinary learning”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Leonardo da Vinci was a maker – perhaps the greatest maker of all time.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“children should engage in tinkering and making because they are powerful ways to learn.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Lewis Carroll wrote fairytales and was a mathematician. Even today, engineers have revolutionized the film and music industries. Schools would be well served by nurturing polymaths.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Making is a way of bringing engineering to young learners. Such concrete experiences provide a meaningful context for understanding abstract science and math concepts. For older students, making combines disciplines in ways that enhance the learning process for diverse student populations and opens the doors to unforeseen career paths.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“While school traditionally separates art and science, theory, and practice, such divisions are artificial. The real world just doesn’t work that way!”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“When we allow children to experiment, take risks, and play with their own ideas, we give them permission to trust themselves. They”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“In most school activities, structure is valued over serendipity. Understanding is often “designed” by an adult committee prior to even meeting the students. Play is something you do at recess, not in class where students need to “settle down” and “be serious.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Maria Montessori said, “The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“when you do something yourself, the thing that changes most profoundly is you. (Frauenfelder, 2011)”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“New knowledge results from the process of making sense of new situations by reconciling new experiences or information with what the learner already knows or has experienced. This profoundly personal process underlies all learning. In this sense, the new buzzword of “personalized learning” is redundant. All learning is personal. Always.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Making is a stance that puts the learner at the center of the educational process and creates opportunities that students may never have encountered themselves. Makers are confident, competent, curious citizens in a new world of possibility.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Papert takes great pains to declare that one particular experience, no matter how rich, might not have the same effect on other learners. To Papert, “the most powerful idea of all is the idea of powerful ideas.” (Papert, 1980) His life’s work has been creating tools, theories, and coercion-free learning environments that inspire children to construct powerful ideas through firsthand experience.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Fifty years later, the motto of the maker movement, “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it,” and the emphasis on learning by doing resonates with the Hacker Ethic dating back to MIT a half century ago.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“As in today’s maker movement, connections between ideas, people, and disciplines are complex and abundant.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Making is a way of bringing engineering to young learners. Such concrete experiences provide a meaningful context for understanding abstract science and math concepts.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Hundreds of thousands of adults and children alike are frequenting Maker Faires, hackerspaces, and DIY (Do-It-Yourself) websites.”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“Arduino”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“side-by-side with books”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“In school, this explicit teaching of facts and procedures is rampant in almost every subject area. In science, it’s called “the scientific method” and often includes steps such as: Observe something and/or do research. Construct a hypothesis. Make a prediction based on your hypothesis. Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment. Analyze the results of your experiment. Determine if your hypothesis was correct. The steps vary slightly between models. However, no matter the actual words on the checklist, or how many steps are included, we teach them to children as if they descended on stone tablets. Teachers devise songs or mnemonic devices to help students memorize the rigid steps. Then students memorize the vocabulary words that go along with the scientific method: hypothesis, fair test, variables, control groups, reliability, validity, etc. Finally, students fill out worksheets to match the vocabulary words with the correct definitions and put the steps in order. This is not science. Science is about wonder and risk and imagination, not checklists or vocabulary memorization. Alan Kay laments that much of what schools teach isn’t science at all, it’s science appreciation. (Kay, 2007)”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

“One great new idea is Squishy Circuits – edible conductive and non-conductive dough that you mold just like regular modeling clay,”
― Sylvia Libow Martinez, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom