Design. Develop. Tinker. Build. Imagine. Solve.
These were the directives to students at Harvey Clarke Elementary School Thursday, pasted onto colorful signs around the playground. Inspired by the national Maker Faire series, second grade teacher Barbara Barker held a fair of her own. About a dozen outdoor activity stations invited children to craft, create and question.
Barker was looking at ways to incorporate STEM - science, technology, energy and math - subjects into her classroom, along with the hands-on skills of arts and crafts.
"Maker Faires are for adults and for kids," Barker said. "It's where people of a community come together with different skills and simply share them with each other, and build and create things. I hope to inspire Forest Grove to hold their own Maker Faire."
Engineers and employees from Intel and Nike (who are also parents of Harvey Clarke students) guided activity stations where children took apart a computer, created a circuit board, and generated electricity using apples and nails. For the most part, they let the kids ask the questions and drive the experiments.
Some of the stations left children to play freely with Lincoln Logs or Legos, no assignment given. They also had the opportunity to make crafts, including Love Rocks and gift bags.
Third grader Carter Phipps spent his time tinkering with Legos.
"You can build anything, really," he said. "It's like building a house, which is fun, but you can do it when you're a kid. You can build a car, you can build anything you want... If you had every single Lego in the world, you could probably build anything."
That's the idea: to get kids thinking about what they could build, and how they'd do it.
Parent Dan Emerson, who works as a customer service manager for direct-to-consumer accounts at Nike, brought several deconstructed sneakers for students to explore.
"The idea of showing everything that's involved in putting a shoe together – and not just a shoe, but anything – can peak the interest of a child and maybe get their creative wheels turning," he said. "I definitely don't want them to go home and take shoes apart, please don't do that, but just to show them everything that goes into a process is important."