Category: Making

Man with 3D printer

Learning from libraries

Kyle

There’s a great article in the New York Times today about public libraries retooling as “stuff-braries,” places to learn the guitar, borrow some snow shoes, or connect to a 3D printer.

As per usual with such articles, I found it hard to not read the whole thing by substituting “libraries” with “churches” and considering the implications. Consider this sentence:

“[Libraries] realized that the way you best serve your community is to look like them,” Professor Lankes said. “For some, that means 3-D printers. For others, it means fishing rods.”

Or this one:

The economic downturn forced many public libraries, especially in urban areas, to close branches, curtail hours and cut staff even as demand for their services by job seekers increased. To make up the difference, many libraries turned to foundations, private donors, friend groups and corporations for support.

Or this one:

The move toward electronic content has given us an opportunity to re-evaluate our physical spaces and enhance our role as a community hub.

What can churches learn from libraries, especially as both aging cornerstones of American institutional life make sense of, and common cause with, the Maker Movement?

Read the whole thing here.

Image credit: “Fab Lab Exeter Library” by Devon Libraries via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

Clay bible figures

Sunday school students should be making things

Kyle

The pro position of today’s Key Resources Point/Counterpoint gets to the core of my concerns about traditional Sunday school models:

My own education prioritized hands-on, project-based, interdisciplinary, student-empowered learning.

 

I wrote jingles and parodies as a participant in Odyssey of the Mind and Destination Imagination, months-long creative problem-solving competitions. I built towers and trebuchets out of nothing but ropes and poles as a Boy Scout.

 

I performed music and theater and produced big events as a member of garage bands and pit orchestras and student play festival teams. And I helped create monthly newspapers and a yearly literary magazine as a well-mentored student journalist.

 

At the same time all that was happening, and especially in the later years of it, my church was encouraging me to learn like this: by sitting in a room and talking.

Read the whole thing here.

Image credit: “Godly Play Resurrected” by Claire via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Lisa Brown with Mr. Rogers photo

Tech fluency and Christian formation

Kyle

Writing for the e-Formation blog, Lisa Brown explains how she and Kyle got inspired by the maker movement at Context 2015 in Pittsburgh:

As an incredible example of the intersection of humanities and science, we learned about one of the “Arts & Bots” projects in which students created motorized shoebox dioramas based on poetry.

In choosing which poetic image to represent, and by carefully constructing the diorama out of traditional craft materials brought to life by robotic components for motion, sound, and light, the students were encouraged to “go deeper” into the meaning of the poems they were studying.

They were forced to consider the writer’s intention and context, as they reread and interpreted the words as a visual, animated image. In their personal response, they were forced to ask “I wonder?” questions.

Wait a minute. That creative exegesis and questioning sounds a lot like Godly Play.

Read more of Lisa’s Christian formation reflections here.

Google Pittsburgh sign

I have a hunch: The church and the maker movement

Kyle

I have a hunch.

The maker movement is changing the way we think about education, formation, creativity, job training, and so much more.  I think the church is going to learn a lot from this movement. I think the church is a natural participant and partner.

“The world is a better place as a participatory sport,” says Mark Hatch. I say the church is nothing if not a participatory sport.

I don’t know where any of this is going, but I know I can’t not write, think, and do something about the way I came alive when Lisa Brown and I spent the week with a bunch of makers in Pittsburgh recently. I know it’s not just because I’m engineer. The church is called to creativity.

The church has a lot to learn from the maker movement, and I hope vice versa. Let’s test that hypothesis in as active a way as possible.

More soon.