March 2018

Total Granted:  $47,500

 

The APS IDEAStudio (next level Makerstudio)

IDEAS = Innovation + Design + Engineering + Arts and Sciences

Because

the Sciences help us understand how the world works and

the Arts help us understand how we will work in the world

Design, Innovation, and Engineering/Entrepreneurship (along with others)

are great tools to help us engage the complexities of this work.

Overview

APS defines innovation as “the relentless pursuit of opportunity” and “doing things differently enough to get better results” for our students and teachers. In other words, innovation across APS shares the same definition as progress and the core belief that education and learning is future work.  Connecting students and faculty and enabling them to collaborate to build things to learn and solve real problems brings the classroom culture into line with real-world work and gives students a clear sense of how learning can be transformative. In APS we call it Authentic Learning.

Authentic learning engages students in the collaborative creation of products or solutions that require extended focus over time, match the complex real-world tasks and investigations of professionals in practice, and integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines.

The APS IDEAStudio will be the extension of our Pk-5 Maker Studios where APS faculty and students can work collaboratively in the environments, with the resources, and the support to engage not only cutting-edge curricula and instruction, but also push their practice as learners.

The mission is to improve the experience of teaching and learning.  Everything we engage in the IDEAStudio is in support of authentic and personalized, student-centered, constructionist learning by working together to create solutions. Moving from memorization of facts and formulas to application, our focus is on invention, innovation, and collaborative problem-solving. Students in the IDEAStudio (maker-studios) learn to engage art, science, design, entrepreneurship, and engineering in order to enhance all of the essential learning as readers, writers, thinking and collaborators. APS wants to foster our students as SOLUTIONARIES. We want our students and teachers engaging complex, ill-defined problems to solve real-world problems, and designing experiences that examine their own ideas through research and hands-on field work.