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Make: Learning LABS' MISSION
We believe that everyone is a maker, but not everyone can get the opportunity to develop the makers’ skills and mindset. Make: Learning Labs is a program that can help you grow your talents through a series of labs in which you will work on hands-on projects. Our goal is to help you discover what interests you and your abilities, no matter your previous educational experiences. We believe you can become a good learner who is confident in his or her ability to be productive and do meaningful work. That is, you become a maker who can create new things and, once you see yourself as a maker, you can innovate and change the world for the better.
WHY Make: Learning LABS
We believe that everyone is a maker, but not everyone can get the opportunity to develop the makers’ skills and mindset. Make: Learning Labs is a program that can help you grow your talents through a series of labs in which you will work on hands-on projects. Our goal is to help you discover what interests you and your abilities, no matter your previous educational experiences. We believe you can become a good learner who is confident in his or her ability to be productive and do meaningful work. That is, you become a maker who can create new things and, once you see yourself as a maker, you can innovate and change the world for the better.
Why Now More than ever ?
Education should be more than the kind of content typically delivered in books, lectures, and increasingly online. It should be about learning experiences that develop communication, creativity, applied understanding, and problem-solving. These experiences should be happening in the real world, not apart from it.
- According to the New York Federal Reserve, between 1982 and 2001, American workers’ average wages with a bachelor’s degree rose by 31%. In contrast, those of high-school graduates did not move.
- In the following 12 years, college graduates’ wages fell by more than those of their less-educated peers.
- Meanwhile, tuition costs at universities have been rising. Even when a college degree is, in some cases, a prerequisite for a job, employers don’t trust it enough to hire prospects without experience.
What happens to people growing up?
As the COVID-19 crisis has shown us, formal education has failed to provide a common language for humans to understand and communicate with each other. All the content learned in biology, statistics, and history hasn’t materialized in applied understanding. Beyond that flaw, formal education hasn’t cultivated a love for learning or curiosity; it has almost killed creativity.
NASA’s recruitment creativity test was used in a longitudinal study and results found:
- 98% of children 4-5 years-old score at the highest of the test, something called creative genius.
- By the time children were ten years old, 30% had scored those points.
- By 15 years old, only 12%.
- Only 2% of adults are creative geniuses.
