Building a Maker Culture at Darlington
By Owen Kinney - Faculty
The Maker culture at Darlington is growing, and we are beginning to implement the idea of design thinking into our curriculum school-wide. From computer programming lessons in grades 3-8 to international robotics competition in the Upper School, students are being afforded more opportunities to innovate in the classroom.
Over the past three months, eight students and three faculty members from Darlington School have participated in the Berry College Maker Academy. The program, funded by Georgia Power and led by Berry’s Creative Technologies faculty, included four Saturday sessions and culminated in a week-long immersion experience in Berry’s Hackberry Lab.
Participants were given in-depth group lessons on programming, physical computing, and prototyping. Student-faculty groups from each participating school were asked to develop a project that used their emerging technical skills. The Darlington team employed programmable logic controllers, a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, a video game emulator, and careful carpentry to develop a table-sized, two-player game system.
Over the next few weeks, we will perfect the design details of the controller case and finish developing video games. The work of all Berry Maker Academy participants will be displayed at the Berry Maker Academy booth at the Atlanta Maker Faire on Oct. 3.
This Monday, Darlington will begin its second year of the Maker Challenge Summer Program. This enrichment camp has grown to two week-long sessions: Inventing with Technology (Grades 3-5) and Engineering in the MakerSpace (Grades 4-8). Each session emphasizes invention, collaboration, and skill development across all STEAM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics).
In addition, the camp offers a unique professional development opportunity for our teachers to experiment with innovative classroom technologies. The tools and the expertise acquired at the camp are brought into classrooms the following school year.
Starting this year, look forward to even more STEAM-oriented activities and interscholastic competitions in the middle grades as well as a new Creative Technologies course at the Upper School.
