Photo: MakerFaireAfrica2012Make for a great weekend of learning and creativity. This Thursday the Population Institute and Vermont-based Population Media Center will host the 32nd annual Global Media Awards in New York City. “Each year PI honors journalists, filmmakers, radio and television show hosts, and editorial cartoonists from around the world who write about population issues. The awards are designed to promote accurate and broader media coverage of population and development issues. 2011 marks the 32nd year for the Global Media Awards.” I’m looking forward to experiencing the range of media – radio, print, and film – and to hear more about the achievements in development that can be made through novel and compelling use of media for awareness, education, and behavior change.
Friday and Saturday will be at a very interesting gathering, “Design, Make, Play – Growing the Next Generation of Science Innovators” at the New York Hall of Science. The meeting flows out of a charge President Obama made to the National Academies of Science and their allies in 2009 to, “Think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, – whether its science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent – to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.” As an arts educator and a parent, I’m highly attuned to the drive for “technology” in Vermont classrooms without an accompanying pedagogy and capacity to teach our children to create on these tools. Too often, technology is an aid for teachers to share their content in more attention-grabbing ways. This is the wrong way to go. Because the make movement is fundamentally about appropriation and a “do it yourself” science attitude, the exploration inherent in “Design, Make, Play” is fundamentally the right direction for preparing our young people for success.
