IDEAS (Inventing, Designing, and Engineering for All Students) Maker Program

The IDEAS Maker Program is a curriculum for an informal maker program that engages middle school students with a range of abilities in engineering design activities. It culminates in a project based on their own interests, which they create with a computer-aided design software called TinkerCAD and print on a 3D printer. The program is based on the Make Academy summer camp, held at New York Hall of Science’s Makerspace. With funding from the National Science Foundation, a collaborative team redesigned that museum-based program so that it could be run in schools by teachers. The design team included:

• researchers from EDC and SRI International
• museum program developers from New York Hall of Science
• experts from the ASD Nest Support Project at New York University
• graduate students from the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University 
• science and special education teachers from the ASD Nest inclusion middle schools in New York City