Making+Makers

The Greengineers and the Office of Ingenuity are  Making Maker Culture Welcome to "The Office of Ingenuity." This is a picture of our HQ, our maker space, design lab, think tank, fabrication center and innovation zone. In 2007, we started with a few simple ideas about learning and teaching. 17 students joined us and helped create one of the first maker spaces in a public school in the U.S.A. We called ourselves the Greengineers and now have almost 300 students in our NNHS programs.

Newton's Lab, the innovation hub of the Newton Public Schools, grew out of the success of the Greengineers and serves 21 schools, hundreds of teachers, and thousands of students. The Office of Ingenuity was formed as a national maker collaborative with partners across public, private schools, universities, companies, and community organizations. The "Office" hosts dozens of educators and makers from around the world at our NNHS HQ. We are inspired to share all of our curriculum, our big ideas, the lessons learned, and our vision for making maker culture in schools and communities.

We've created this web page to share some of our work. As the Founder and Director of The Office of Ingenuity, the Greengineers, Newton's Lab, the Senior Capstone Projects, I can say that we are inspired by the recent buzz around the maker movement and our government's interest in revitalizing local manufacturing and the brilliant creative innovation embedded within the "Made in America" slogan, because those three words mean something significantly unique to the Makers of America.

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Our work is organized below in five easy steps. Enjoy!

STEP 1: Listen to Sam (GNRG'10, MIT'14)
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Our belief drives us to… 1. __Unshackle Ingenuity with Integration__. Schools created silos of learning (isolated departments/disciplines) but the brain doesn't work that way, nor does the world. = Curriculum Integration
 * STEP 2: BIG IDEAS **

2. __Grapple with Global issues, Locally.__ Technology as a tool will support scalable solutions, but transformational learning is still the result of thought, action, and empathy. =  Purposeful Education

3. __Invest in "Innovators, NOT Innovations."__ = Educators with the right support offer the greatest ROI for social impact and change. =  Professional Development

4. __Broker and Facilitate Revolutionary Collaboration__ between school communities, companies, and universities. It's time for industries and universities to re-imagine their role in public schools through shared values, aka building the innovation pipeline. = Strategic Collaboration

The Mission Create and support maker spaces as ecosystems of opportunity for education,  advanced manufacturing,community and economic development.

**STEP 3: LESSONS LEARNED** What we do best in Greengineering and the Office of Ingenuity, is design and build experiences that challenge and inspire students and the community to do more. Because as Kurt Hahn said, “if you can show someone that they are capable of more, then, for the rest of their lives, it will be difficult for them to settle for less.”

And that fact is why we’re gathering as makers and educators to make the future, together.

Our mission is to create ecosystems of opportunity driven by our Core Four Beliefs aka our Design Principles

These Maker values will guide us in helping to Make the Maker Culture

1. Facilitate Ambiguity (There’s no learning without uncertainty)

2. Entertain the Fantastic (Learning is an experience of wow and awe)

3. Find or Build the Bridge (Integrate to innovate and relationships will connect us to the greatest good)

4. Observe and Embrace Anomaly (Solutions depend on perspective, perspectives reveal the possible)

Everything we do as a community of makers should pass the Core4 test (How did you...? or How does this...?)

A few weeks ago the U.S. Navy announced it will be 50% biodiesel by 2020. We’ve been 100% biodiesel since 2009. The future is now. STEP 4: FUTURE PLANS Together we can design and build the experiences that inspire our students and our communities to do more. In a Maker Space, We can support **educators to be guides and not gatekeepers**, We can challenge **students to be crew on this journey and not passengers**, We can integrate to innovate and **empower students to navigate uncertainty** **We can be solutionaries** and tap into the **21st century tools that help us solve the problems we don’t even know exist** As John F. Kennedy, said "The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men (and women) who can dream of things that never were.” Makers Unite!   As a Maker Collaborative, The Office of Ingenuity is made up of over a dozen public, private schools, community organizations, universities, and industry leaders. Collectively, we support the maker movement across the country through educational programming, comprehensive STEAM'D (STEM + Art and Design) projects, and community and economic development. In 2014-2015, The Office of Ingenuity is supporting the development of two charter High Schools, both inspired maker spaces. ** STEP 5: Gallery of Awesome **

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