Maker movement gets a push into Sonoma County schools from educators

For the first time this fall, Cloverdale Unified School District is getting a “maker” class.

Egon Teodorson, a math teacher at Cloverdale High School, drove the effort - even securing a three-year, $20,000 grant from Santa Rosa’s Career Technical Education Foundation.

And while it’s a first for Cloverdale, it’s something that Sonoma County educators have been quietly using in their classrooms for years.

Maker classes incorporate the maker movement philosophy of learning through making. It’s an idea largely spearheaded by Sebastopol resident Dale Dougherty, founder and executive chairman of Maker Media, Inc., who promotes the DIY mindset as a way to learn skills and educate students in nontraditional ways.

This past week, along with the Sonoma County Office of Education, Dougherty helped organize the reMAKE Education Summit, which was held at 180 Studios, a new 15,000-square-foot warehouse and so-called makerspace in Santa Rosa. The idea was to bring together more than 200 innovative educators - some coming from as far off as Virginia, Indiana and Tennessee, the cities of Pittsburgh and Chicago - to learn more about the maker movement and how it can be integrated into a classroom setting.

“Kids are bored at school, and so how do we engage them? How do they learn best?” Dougherty said. “We need to shift that discussion away from how do we teach them what we’re supposed to teach them, and shift it toward how are they learning best, and what are they interested in learning. What really matters is motivation, and I think making aligns with kids’ motivation. They want to do this. They participate. They get involved. They make things. They want to keep doing it. They want to learn how.”

Casey Shea, who taught math at Analy High School in Sebastopol, was the first teacher in the county to launch a maker class, after Dougherty approached the school with the idea.

That was about six years ago. Since then, he’s become more and more invested in promoting making as a tool for all educators - so much so that for the first time since he became a teacher, Shea doesn’t get a summer vacation. When the school year ended, he took a job with the Sonoma County Office of Education as their curriculum coordinator for maker education.

Before the maker movement hit Analy, Shea was teaching traditional math classes.

“I would watch students coming in from passing period all alive, and then they sit down and their eyes just glaze over,” he said. “And I’ve tried all the tricks to, you know, be a more exciting teacher. But there is just nothing like when they’re actually creating things. ... Kids will stay after school to figure it out, they’ll ask if they can come in on the weekend.”

And the thing about the projects is that kids are finally getting an answer to that age-old question asked by generations of bored math students everywhere, “When am I actually going to use this?”

“Students are using and applying engineering and technology in maker classes,” Shea said. “With all of these machines they’re making, ... If you want to get this thing centered, then you have to know how to use XY coordinates!”

Teodorson has been planning for his own Cloverdale class for about two years now, but things really ramped up this spring and summer. He was in the audience at the reMAKE Education Summit to learn more about how to set up such a class from scratch.

Part of the set-up was transferring from the classroom he’d taught math in for 15 years to a new one, about twice the size of his last one.

He said he expects that it will quickly become his favorite class, and hopes his students feel the same way.

His students will be tasked with creating projects using common materials. In one, they’ll be asked to turn cardboard into a chair that will support the weight of someone on their team. In another, students will need to build a bridge and then stack things on top of it to see how much weight it can hold. Afterward, there will be discussions. Why did someone’s bridge hold up better? Why did that chair break?

“Hopefully students will start thinking about basic math, and how that actually ties in, and it gets kids to realize that what they’re learning in school is something they can actually apply to making things.”

The first day of class - open to students in 10th, 11th and 12th grades - is Aug. 17.

“This is where I think education needs to go,” Teodorson said. “The more I learn about the maker movement, the more I think the subject matter in all classes needs to incorporate it.”

You can reach Staff Writer Christi Warren at 707-521-5205 or christi.warren@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @SeaWarren.