Kawartha Lakes, ON – Learn, play and discover together as a family this September with the return of STEAM Discovery Days!
Saturdays from 10am to 1pm, families are invited to attend Ampere’s Kawartha Lakes Makerspace & Skills Hub where they can explore STEAM together using the tools, technology and games available to our learners of all ages. Registration is not required and there is no cost to attend. Families are welcome to participate for the full three hours or stop by anytime between 10am and 1pm.
With an increased focus on connection through shared discovery and exploration, STEAM Discovery Days encourage families to learn together through play. To make this possible, attendees 12 and younger must be accompanied by an adult.
According to Five Counties Children’s Centre, “small actions with your child every day build connection, confidence and their abilities for life.”
In the Kawartha Lakes Makerspace & Skills Hub, families can experience these moments of connection and confidence building through exploration of science, technology, engineering, art and math alongside peers and educators.
Plus, with the knowledge that the caregivers are in the room and engaging with their learners, Ampere educators can focus more on facilitating more in-depth experimentation, learning and exploration.
“It makes it more impactful and exciting for the learners, to be able to share their interests with their adult through play,” says Emma Holder, STEAM Educator. “It also allows educators the opportunity to dive deeper into STEAM learning, ultimately giving every participant a more meaningful experience.”
Whether coding robots, experimenting through art, building structures or testing technology, the hope is folks who attend STEAM Discovery Days will be creating lasting memories while igniting a spark of curiosity.
Lisa Noble, OCT, B.Ed, Demonstrator at Trent University’s School of Education, has been engaging with makerspaces in one form or another for decades.
“For me, public libraries were the first place that I think of as the makerspaces in my life, and I engaged with those very early,” she says, noting that libraries have been on the leading edge of hosting invitational spaces for people to make.
When her own children, now in their 20s, were interested in tinkering, “it ignited my own interest in finding and developing spaces where that could happen. We bought our first subscription to Make magazine and my elementary classrooms began to have a makerspace element to them. At the same time, I was becoming aware of the lack of publicly accessible makerspaces in my community.”
Today, Noble continues to engage with makerspaces in a number of ways, including visiting her local library and expanding her own crafting space at home. In her work life, Noble facilitates the ever-evolving makerspace at the School of Education at Trent.
“It has a number of purposes. Students are invited to come and use the materials in a free exploration context or to self- and co-regulate, or to participate in scheduled workshops to learn a new skill. A little time with an adult colouring book or a jigsaw puzzle or a crochet hook and yarn can do wonders for an overstimulated brain. Students are invited to think about how those opportunities might work in their own future classrooms,” she explains.
“We also offer circuit-building technology, coding and robotics resources, a Cricut cutter and a wide variety of textile making materials including sewing machines.”
Whether being used by School of Education students at Trent University or by youth at the Kawartha Lakes Makerspace & Skills Hub, makerspaces offer an invaluable resource to the communities they serve.
“I would say the biggest goal of a makerspace is to be an invitational space where people can come and create – no matter what that looks like. It needs to be a space that invites iterative experimentation and celebrates epic failure as part of the process. Whether it’s a high-end engineering lab or a corner of a library with bins of Lego and a weekly build challenge, a makerspace has to allow people to experiment and tinker and solve wicked problems. It is an intensely human space,” says Noble.
“We build amazing community in these spaces. We make together, fail together, laugh together, and learn together. Makerspaces are also huge (and hugely important) economic and skill levelers.”
That’s precisely what Ampere’s Kawartha Lakes Makerspace & Skills Hub hopes to offer: a place to learn, create, grow and discover together.
“There is nothing more exciting than when someone from our community has a project they want to make, or an idea they want to test. And there is nothing more rewarding than being able to be a resource and support someone on that journey,” says Holder.
“I’m so excited to help makers discover what they are capable of, using the resources of our Makerspace during STEAM Discovery Days.”
Updates about STEAM Discovery Days will be posted to our Kawartha Lakes Makerspace Instagram and Facebook accounts, so follow along to stay in the loop.
To learn more about other programming, including programs where learners are not required to be accompanied by an adult, subscribe to our newsletter and visit our website.
