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The Maker MOB (Mobile On-site Builders)

Reach families unfamiliar with the maker movement in communities underrepresented in the STEM fields.

Maker MOB 2.0
 
The Maker MOB (Mobile On-site Builders), funded by the Chicago Community Trust and Hive Chicago, aims to reach families outside of the maker movement to foster a community of makers underrepresented in the STEM fields, working with Chicago students and institutions to lead STEM activities at neighborhood events.
 

Our plan is to provide space in communities in which children are welcome to come tinker, create, and explore with their families right by their side, tinkering as well. This will consist of events, every other month, during the 2017-2018 year. In partnership with GEAR UP schools, we will tag along with an already existing event and then in that same month, invite families to a Maker MOB Family Night to share dinner and making together.

As we move forward and develop this project, we hope to create a sustainable model in which other organizations can collaborate and easily replicate. We will engage and train high school students to assist in facilitating connected informal STEM learning in order to spread making to underserved communities. This will increase its inherent value with parents and students alike. We are asking questions such as: How do we increase the value of STEM spaces? Where can we increase programming? How can we best involve families in STEM learning? Our project should start to answer these questions and create a sustainable model for replicability in future projects.

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Register here for upcoming CenterSpace workshops
 
Visit Maker MOB for a Chicago calendar of STEM events, activity ideas, and more!

Lead Organization:
NEIU Center for College Access and Success

Partner Organizations:
Adler Planetarium , Scientists for Tomorrow , Level Up , Yollocalli , Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum , Chicago Public Library , Project Exploration ,

Project Goal:
The Maker MOB aims to reach families unfamiliar with the maker movement to create a community of makers in communities underrepresented in the STEM fields using students and Chicago institutions to lad STEM activities at neighborhood events.

Project Tags:
Moonshot Solutions, Parent Engagement

Project Portfolio

  • documentation

    Getting Parents & Guardians On-Board with Urban Youth MakerSpaces

    How might we make urban maker spaces for youth living in poverty more explicitly valuable to their parents or guardians? Maker “tasting stations” at local markets or sidewalks!

    C. Meghan Hausman, Roxana Hadad, Kim Richards, Germania Solorzano, Jacob Watson and Robert Friedman collaborated on this IDEO Human Centered Design project as part of a +ACUMEN course on Novoed.