"The brainchild of artists Kyle Hollingsworth and Renee Ridgeley, Hand on 3rd is a workshop and creative space where people could come together and create. The shop offers hands-on training for crafts and arts of all sorts -- from sewing to mosaics -- and a place for like-minded aspiring craftspeople can meet and hash out new projects."

[Video also here: https://vimeo.com/17460475 ]

"The following is a fairly universal list of education design principles for tomorrow’s schools, though it would be tailored to the needs of particular communities: (1) personalized; (2) safe & secure; (3) inquiry-based; (4) student-directed; (5) collaborative; (6) interdisciplinary; (7) rigorous & hands-on; (8) embodying a culture of excellence & high expectations; (9) environmentally conscious; (10) offering strong connections to the local community & business; (11) globally networked; & (12) setting the stage for lifelong learning.<br />
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In designing a school for tomorrow, such underlying principles should drive the discussion…would allow us to address questions around how students should learn, where they should learn, & w/ whom should they learn. We may discover that we need teachers to work in teams…We may conclude that it makes no sense to break down the school day into fixed “periods,” & that state standards can be better met via interdisciplinary & real-world projects."

[via: http://stevemiranda.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/a-primer-on-montessori-education/ ]

...seeks to combine traditional activities in experimental science—use of microscopes, balances, thermometers, culturing plants and animals—with building a variety of projects with clay, wood, and plastic, including pendulums, electric and mechanical toys, musical instruments, and apparatuses that enhance our explorations of sound, light, and color.<br />
In all our activities in the workshop the emphasis is upon learning from observation and direct experience with real things rather than simply accepting the truth of transmitted knowledge, whether the source is books or teachers. Our favorite quote is from physicist Richard Feynman: “Science doesn’t teach anything, experience teaches it.”

"Those are magic words to Dan Sudran, 64, who conducted the balloon experiment the other day in the Mission Science Workshop he runs in a former high school auto shop on Church Street in San Francisco.<br />
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Sudran's do-it-yourself laboratory is to science what a wizard's lair is to sorcery. Complete animal skeletons hang from the ceiling or from perches - a cow found in the Salinas Valley, an ostrich acquired by way of Sudran's butcher, a dolphin donated by a guy in Bolinas.<br />
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There's a mummified cat that a janitor found at a middle school, its fangs still agape in terror. A pelican in dramatic rigor mortis is available for inspection. Bones, flippers, femurs, hooves, teeth and beaks are arranged in evolutionary order on a table. Donors include bears, pigs, sea lions, armadillos and humans."

"cultural zeitgeist of life in 2010 America is clearly saying "We need to start thinking with our hands again", & that we need at least to have confidence in our decision making as we seek to create things of intrinsic value…It's not difficult to get to a strong, compelling point of view. That's what design thinking can do for you. But in each of these videos I sense our society expressing a strong yearning for something beyond process, the courage to make decisions and to act. Talking and thinking is easy, shipping is tough…<br />
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Tinkering, hacking, experimenting, they're all ways of experiencing the world which are more apt than not to lead to generative, highly creative outcomes. I firmly believe that kids & young adults who are allowed to hack, break, tear apart, & generally probe the world around them develop an innate sense of courage when it comes time to make a decision to actually do something. I see this all the time at Stanford…"

"By the time they reach ninth grade, they're bored to death and most stay in school only because their parents make them, or because they've been convinced that this bitter pill must be swallowed if they want to get a decent job. . . . It's just dues you pay to avoid a blue-collar future." - Eliot Wigginton in "Foxfire: 25 Years"<br />
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"You guys are basically going to teach yourselves. I'm only going to be here to advise you," is about what the teacher said.<br />
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"Coe was espousing pure "Foxfire" - an unorthodox, self-directed, hands-on way of learning. A traditional teacher for 22 years, she adopted the Foxfire Approach last year after taking a summer course taught by its founder, Eliot Wigginton."

"Imagine a retirement where you could have an extra $1million to $3 million in the bank with basically no effort. Now imagine telling your kids that you aren't going to send them to college. And, you go on, you want them to immediately start a business or get to work as soon as they finish high school.<br />
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These are difficult things to imagine because we've been so scammed by the "career industry" that tells us we need college degrees in order to succeed in life, regardless of how much money we spend for those degrees or what we actually do with our lives during the four to eight years it takes us to get those degrees.<br />
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But in my view, the entire college degree industry is a scam, a self-perpetuating Ponzi scheme that needs to stop right now."

"We need to build new environments that support experiential, creative & individualized learning. School of One...exemplifies this personalized approach to learning. Via tech-based platforms, students are given personalized lists of learning objectives, which allows all learners to achieve their daily learning objectives at their own pace. Better yet, the school supports students’ multiple intelligences thanks to a diversity of teaching strategies, which include virtual tutoring & video game-based learning."

[part of a series: http://www.fastcodesign.com/users/tle ]

"The reason we found this interesting, is because not uncommonly we see very different conceptual thinking and memory styles among the students. A common pattern among our gifted dyslexic students who are strong spatial thinkers (high spatial reasoning, love to build, hands-on learners) is their preference for autobiographical / personal memory. They have vivid memories for personal experiences, but may need many repetitions for dry information that is master by rote repetition...

"The sports teams at Forest Grove High School are called the Vikings. And every year, some students build what they call a "Viking house" in the surrounding neighborhood. It's a real house that the school sells to raise money...

"My experience in school from the age of, say 11 or 12, to 14 often leads me to the conclusion that the best "middle school" would be almost no school at all. Kids have so much to learn during this period of their lives, but almost none of "that" is academic. They need to learn how to function as independent "adults." They need to learn their bodies. They need to discover the world. They need to pursue passions of all kinds. They need to learn how to hurt and how to recover. And they need to begin to imagine their future.

"Our purpose is to broaden and refocus public conversation about early childhood and its long-term implications for a child’s life and for society; to restore imaginative play and hands-on, experiential learning as central activities in kindergartens and preschools; and to support stable, loving relationships with all adults in children’s lives."

"My name is Catherine Herdlick. I make cross-media games and game-like things to entertain and delight. I have designed games that last 20 minutes and games that last 2 months about things like bicycles, perfume, and ghosts. You can find out more about all of my projects right here on this website! [...] After Wesleyan, I worked at the Boston Children's Museum where I caught the learning-while-doing bug while creating hands-on activities and programs for the museum's community outreach initiatives."

"kids were great...earnest & curious...to say they captured my heart would be an understatement. However, teaching them revealed a stark illustration of situation we’re facing in education, at least from my point of view as a designer. The skills or intuition I assumed they had for drawing, observation & building were alarmingly underdeveloped. In short, any in-born human willingness to experiment, cut, glue, break, build or paint, had atrophied. I had set out to teach design as a problem solving process (which it is!) but along the way I had forgotten that it is also a frame of mind— almost literally. In design, thinking “differently” is paramount. Often, that is achieved through expressions like building, drawing, tinkering. Using your hands to build, draw, & tinker takes the problem out of your head, or as some science might indicate, from 1 side of your head to the other. The education system, for myriad reasons valid & otherwise, has abandoned “right-brained” skills."

"Students love to explore. They ask questions, they are curious.

"Research shows that hands-on learning is powerful and effective. In the well-meaning efforts to create standards in education, context, creativity, and our natural inclinations to explore and play, have been replaced with mountains of homework and a curriculum that is unlikely to effectively prepare youth for the 21st century. In schools, failure is stigmatized, emotionally disabling, and has become a label and a measure rather than part of a feedback system supporting iteration and exploration. The most productive scientists and inventors will tell you that they fail constantly, all day long. ... With hands-on learning, failure is iteration, in the spirit of how the most accomplished scientists and inventors work. In the somewhat misguided efforts to “teacher proof” the educational system, we have lost what good teachers bring to the system: passion, curiosity, love of learning, and an ability to create a learning ecosystem in a classroom, a school and a community."

"In today’s shifting education climate, few people would assert that a teacher standing in front of a class is the only, or even the most, effective way of helping children to learn. Encouraged by the government to pursue a more “creative” curriculum, in both primary and secondary schools, teachers are exploring different ways of developing independent learners, creative thinkers and able team-workers. A participatory approach to learning is increasingly coming to the fore, where the whole class works as a team and the teacher learns alongside the pupils, taking the role of a guide or facilitator, while pupils take responsibility for important aspects of decision making."

"American tradition of tinkering...is making comeback, boosted by renewed interest in hands-on work amid economic crisis & falling prices of high-tech tools & materials...Engineering schools across country report students are showing an enthusiasm for hands-on work that hasn't been seen in years. Workshops for people to share tools & ideas -"hackerspaces"- are popping up all over country...124 in US...up from a handful at the start of last year. SparkFun...expects sales of about $10 million this year, up from $6 million in 2008. "Make" mag...has grown from 22,000 subscribers in 2005 to > 100,000 now...annual "Maker Faire"...attracted 75,000 people this year. "We've had this merging of DIY with technology," says Bre Pettis..."I'm calling it Industrial Revolution 2."...Hands-on is catching on at other schools...27% more undergrads earned mechanical-engineering degrees in 2008 than 2003...[while] # of computer-engineering graduates slipped by 31%."

"The legendary design team Charles and Ray Eames made films, houses and classic midcentury modern furniture. Eames Demetrios, their grandson, shows rarely seen films and archival footage in a lively, loving tribute to their creative process."

Just a few clips: "In support of both of those ideas, we are working with a homeschooling (both unschooling, and curriculum-based) group in Santa Rosa, California who are allowing us to experiment with their children (cue cartoon-ominous laugh). ... If we are to change public policy around testing, we will have to show that not-testing works better. Tinkering School is an experiment in one aspect of that, but their are some courageous efforts out there like the Sudbury Valley schools that have been creating an unschooling-like experience in a school-like facility for more than 30 years -- and showing that it works. Almost 90 percent of kids from those schools go on to higher education after graduating -- and that's after never haven taken a test in their lives."

"Gever Tulley uses engaging photos and footage to demonstrate the valuable lessons kids learn at his Tinkering School. When given tools, materials and guidance, these young imaginations run wild and creative problem-solving takes over to build unique boats, bridges and even a rollercoaster!"

"Like everyone, I hit my attention limit nearly every day. Seth is right when he says “You can’t read every important blog… you can’t even read all the blogs that tell you what the important blogs are saying.” That’s a reason to explore some more, not to give up. We shouldn’t become fatalistic about the future of information or look down our noses at all that messy stuff strewn about the Internet. I never want the flow of information to slow down or, worse, retract, no matter how much mess gets in the way of finding the stuff that matters to me. What we may need are more dramatic changes in our language, more effective information discovery services, more experience-based education programs both for kids and adults, and, perhaps even more important than all that, an altered world view that can accommodate and make the most of the vast resources that are now part of our culture forever."

"They represent a mindset that has been a disaster for American economic prosperity, for the auto industry, the banking business, the publishing industry, not just schooling. The days when these fields were led by people who knew autos, banks, and books is long gone. (Silicon Valley still rests on the tinkerer craftsmen, perhaps)...The American genius lay precisely, I still think, in this “hands-and-minds-on” approach. It’s what people educated in schools and workshops shared—a merging of “street” smarts and “book” smarts. The schools we deserve need to build on that genius. At best they are a genuine place of work—a laboratory, library, artist’s studio, and marketplace of ideas for teachers, kids, and their fellow citizens."

"Other than Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, there are simply no other decent books for beginner chemical experimenter...Follow the instructions in Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments & you'll be on your way to chemical literacy."