MAKER SATURDAYS
John Kilbane
One Saturday each month ASB runs Maker Saturday
between 9 am and noon, an event where students
from across grade levels and their parents can spend
time together to make and tinker. The Maker
Movement is something that has been embedding
itself into the daily lives of the ASB community for a
little over a year and is now all but routine for some
families. From cardboard boats and robots, to knitting
scarves, to learning how to make ice cream. From
nerdy derby car races, to drones and paper airplanes,
costume construction, Lego robotics, and origami.
Maker Saturday offers a wide range of science,
engineering, programming, crafts, and family fun for
all those who participate giving them a chance to try something new and engage in making.
The heart and soul of Maker Saturday is family engagement. Kids see it as a fun time to play with others,
dream, and create but parents see it as one of the best opportunities to spend quality time with their
kids that they don’t get during the busy weekdays. It’s the small interactions like a mother encouraging
her son not to give up on their project when they ran into a tough problem, or a father helping design
his daughter’s cardboard kitchen so she could serve him a cardboard meal. These are the reasons Maker
Saturday is so powerful.
An element that is critical to the popularity and
success of Maker Saturday is the range of activities
planned. Each month the R&D department discusses
what stations should be available for the following
month’s Maker Saturday. We structure it so there are
five headline activities and four to five secondary
activities. Cardboard construction is a secondary
activity but very popular; hence it runs on every Maker
Saturday. For the headline activities, each month we
make sure that we have activities related to science,
engineering, art, programming, and parent
engagement.
Parents helping their kids build mansions, kitchens and
space ships out of cardboard during Maker Saturday
A parent helping his son learn how to spool knit using
toilet paper, popsicle sticks and yarn.
