In a city just outside of Boston, students are busy designing and creating in the school’s basement. After noticing that the woodshop at Malden High School hadn’t been used much in the last two years, the school’s principal reached out to nearby Tufts University’s Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) for help with bringing the workshop to its full potential. Tufts University is working with a two year, $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to research how “maker spaces” can empower youth in urban high schools.
The former woodshop is now a busy hub for inquiry-based arts and engineering projects. This semester Daniel Wise, a Tufts educator in residence, teaches an elective course in the workshop. As the name implies, inquiry-based learning involves posing questions, problems or scenarios to students, as opposed to traditional didactic teaching. For example, a recent assignment started because the Malden students were complaining that they wanted to charge their phones in classrooms, but they worried about theft and damage. The students were then tasked with designing and creating prototypes of secure phone charging stations.
The workshop is stocked with a 3D printer, woodworking tools, electronics and circuitry stations, soldering materials, a guitar-making station, and Lego EV3 robotics sets that are connected to laptops. The setup allows students to build and program devices made from robotic Lego parts. Students can also experiment after school with less structure, under the guidance of Tufts undergraduates. In a school where 65 percent of students come from low-income families, the revamped workshop gives teens an opportunity to innovate and learn through engineering in practice.
