MAPR: Mobile Arts and Performance Rig Pilot Project

Mobile Arts

an education pilot project

Ingenuity Cleveland, best known for producing Cleveland’s annual 3-day IngenuityFest, is announcing an exciting new pilot project. Our Mobile Arts Education Pilot Program is aimed at creating a highly accessible and interactive travelling platform to showcase innovation and inspire creativity, especially in underserved areas. Our core focus is on the union of art and technology, and we intend to promote the unique interaction between these fields through creative hands-on projects that encourage students, families and young adults to explore their passions and find the broadest application of their interests as they pursue their education, including higher education, as well as career opportunities.

Ingenuity Cleveland has recently celebrated 10 years of bringing world-class arts and technology programming to activate urban spaces and highlight the unexpected, primarily through our iconic annual festival. As we move into our next ten years, we are undergoing a transition that will shift our focus to year round programming, educational outreach, and community development. We will continue to activate and highlight our city’s unique assets, and looking forward, that means unleashing the potential of the valuable human resources in the communities who call Cleveland home through activities that engaging and empowering.

We are developing a unique model for delivering a sense wonder and inspiration directly into the hands of those who will benefit most – partnering with neighborhood and community groups, as well as school and institutions, we are creating the vision for a whimsical and otherworldly moving classroom with all the tools needed to explore and create.

Our final goal is the creation of a traveling classroom like no other, with the power to open people’s minds, and more importantly, open doors to opportunity. We’d be honored to consider you a partner and supporter of this project, and look forward to further conversation. We hope you’ll reach out to learn more!

Sincerely, Emily Appelbaum emily@ingenuitycleveland.org Program Director, Ingenuity Cleveland

Pilot Project

MAPR: Mobile Arts and Performance Rig

MAPR: a moving platform for pop-up performance and hands-on arts education that can serve a variety of Cleveland Neighborhoods.

We are building a platform to bring flexible, light-weight, low cost arts, technology and maker programming to a variety of settings, primarily in underserved populations. We're embarking on a two-phase journey to first investigate and implement the Mobile Educational Pilot Program, and ultimately to design and construct a Mobile Arts and Performance Rig.

Funds will support research, ramp up and initial execution of an adaptable program capable of partnering with a variety of clients throughout the Cleveland community, including schools, community centers and other nonprofits, in order to provide experiences that instruct, enrich, and ultimately inspire users to uncover and pursue their passion.

Our goal is to develop a program capable of adapting to a variety of circumstances, from serving a classroom of 20 students to providing hands-on educational activities for hundreds of youth and adults over an afternoon. When fully implemented, this project may consider a full season of regular classroom visits, appearances at large-scale outdoor events, and Ingenuity's own programming. In bringing art, technology and science to light in a new environment -- by creating access to tools, small projects, and interesting experiments -- the MAPR will encourage interest and discovery in all who encounter it.

Goal 1: To activate the STEAM subjects in an engaging way, in unusual environments, in populations most likely to be positively affect by such a program.

Objectives: Building partnerships to support and activate such programming; Vetting precedents and methodologies to deliver; Identifying requirements, materials and structures necessary to implement best practice approaches; and Piloting best practice approaches.

Goal 2: Ensure that the delivered services create a lasting benefit, by creating connections to

lifelong passions, possible career paths, or other positive outcomes.

Objectives: Build program refinement and re-evaluation into the project; Collect first-hand accounts and data from clients and participants; Shape program offerings and structure in response to feedback from partners and participants.

Goal 3: Activating the community in the creation of a shared vision.

Objectives: Involve community in the visioning process, and respond directly to stated needs in

shaping the Pilot Program; shape the final phase of the program, the Mobile Rig, to focus on user-provided solutions . . . that is, adapt a vehicle by directly engaging students in its design and construction.

A number of distinct steps will guide our pilot program's development: • Research and Precedents: guided by Ingenuity Staff, primarily the Program Director, this phase will involve exploration of similar projects and information gathering regarding challenges and best practices

• Board Input: this phase will make use of our engaged board, with its active connections throughout the Cleveland arts and education community, to make recommendations for program development

• Partner Support: this phase will rely on guidance and statements of need from our extensive network of partnerships, established and emerging, throughout the Cleveland

community, including CDC’s and CMSD schools

• Curriculum Design and Program Ramp Up: Based on stakeholder and partner input, we will design an approach aimed at bringing arts education directly into target communities, and gather the needed materials and resources.

• Pilot Implementation and Evaluation: We will deliver programming, and evaluate our success, aiming for initial program delivery in 2016.

• Refinement and Design for the MAPR Educational Unit: Based on our successes and challenges, we will shape an enduring platform for mobile arts education, with possible student involvement in planning, design and construction of the MAPR platform, slated for 2017.

Ingenuity has already experimented with a number of mobile platforms such at the highly popular Make Space, appearing at IngenuityFest in 2012-2015 and serving a quarter of festivalgoers each year, for a total of 30,000 participants. Through workshops and educational offerings at the Maker Faire, we've seen first-hand the interest in learning to tinker and participate in learning through hands-on activities. By collaborating with educators, artists, engineers and childhood development specialists, we will shape a program with the goal of being a first-of-its-kind traveling toolbox and classroom, which will nonetheless be informed by likeminded efforts elsewhere: http://thecrucible.org/educational-response-vehicle-erv/ http://mobileartsclassroom.com/ http://intertextural.com/urban-intertexture/#/unorthodox-art-education-everywhere/ http://awe-inc.org/truck-studio.php

Stages, Storage & Fold-out Furniture:

--Unique arrangement of items inside truck body -- Stacking, nesting, or rolling “units” that can “deploy”to suit variety programming needs -- Transportable units switch out and may include generators, welders, upcycling supplies and stackable modular furniture -- Truck side fold up, down, slide, reveal storage compartments or become part of a backdrop

Serious Party on Wheels:

Options for Built-in Storage:

Education

and the Maker Movement

“

The Maker Movement, a technological and creative learning revolution underway around the globe, has exciting and vast

implications for the world of education. New tools and technology, such as 3D printing, robotics, microprocessors, wearable

computing, e-textiles, “smart” materials, and programming languages are being invented at an unprecedented pace. The Maker Movement creates affordable or even free versions of these inventions, while sharing tools and ideas online to create a vibrant, collaborative community of global problem-solvers.

Fortunately for teachers, the Maker Movement overlaps with the natural inclinations of children and the power of learning by doing. By embracing the lessons of the Maker Movement, educators can revamp the best student-centered teaching practices to engage learners of all ages.

One might try to marginalize robotics or 3D fabrication as having nothing to do with “real” science and dismiss such activities as play or as just super-charged hobbies. However, today’s new low-cost, flexible, creative, and powerful materials should be viewed as building blocks for today’s children. They offer much more than just “handson” crafting—these tools bring electronics, programming, and computational mathematics together in meaningful, powerful ways. We must reimagine school science and math not as a way to prepare students for the next academic challenge, or a future career, but as a place where students are inventors, scientists, and mathematicians today. **

Making, makers and the Maker Movement: These might seem like flip, superficial buzzwords or trendy identities. But they represent concepts that are at once timeless, rooted, and wholly suited to a perfect storm of new technological materials and global circumstances. The maker movement is a renewed interest in DIY-ism and crafting, with a focus on technology, open source platforms and peer-to-peer sharing, and an emphasis on exploration, problem solving and personal fulfillment. It is the basic human impulse to create, and it is an unprecedented explosion of coincidences that allows us to exalt that impulse like never before, while returning to something that’s been there all along.

Once upon a time, there was no difference between learning and living. We are hard-wired to pick up information constantly, about the plants to eat, the animals to run from. For most of human history, we were schooled within the context of daily life, learning to milk cows in our family units and completing apprenticeships that threaded seamlessly into future careers.

Increasingly complex educational systems have divorced learning from real-world problems, only to struggle in reuniting them down the road. Areas of learning have been harshly cordoned off from each other, and some – like art and music – have been forced into a lesser category, despite a crush of evidence proving their value.

Making brings these pieces back into dialogue with each other, and puts the maker at the center of the conversation.

Many of the core tenants of the maker movement are already familiar to educators in the concepts of constructivism and project based learning, through the works of researchers like Dewey and Piaget. These thinkers suggest that learning is an active process that takes place within the context of an experience.

People aren’t taught knowledge; they construct it.

Underneath everything, this idea persists in the educational system today. Despite crowded classrooms, core curriculums and cumbersome standardized testing, teachers strive to honor agency, individualism and active engagement. We know based on research that active learning actually fires up more and different parts of our brain than passive watching; people build new knowledge with particular effectiveness when they are constructing personally meaningful products in a self-directed fashion.

Allowing for learning differences and celebrating each student’s unique strengths; encouraging children to follow their particular fascinations; and understanding that knowledge is gained through experience more than exposure are strategies that unite classroom teaching at its best, and making at its most basic. And now, like never before, we have the tools, the vocabulary, the political climate – and the imperative – to explore that intersection.

White House -issued manifestos on STEM education and new mandates for higher education, the drive to return local manufacturing to our cities and scientists to our ranks: these are movements created by real, undeniable economic and physical circumstances of today’s planet. The problems to be solved are complex, multidimensional, and changing faster than ever before. The solutions can’t be taught. But the process for finding them can be learned.

Broad thinking, teamwork, leadership and mutual respect are all skills shown to have arisen in classrooms focused on creativity and immersive learning.

This wisdom is colliding a swell of interest in self-reliance and a surge of new technologies that are becoming cheaper, more widely available, and more easily replicable at an ever-quickening pace. We have more tools than ever to address dissatisfaction with a culture of disengagement and consumption; indeed, we addressing dissatisfactions we didn’t even know we had! We’re building wearable computers, printable circuit boards, medical devices, daily conveniences, and so much more.

Today, students have unprecedented access to the tools needed to construct such products – not models of products, akin to “a train leaving Chicago heading west at 60 miles per hour.” Not made up problems.

Real challenges for which they can create solutions, thereby building confidence, social skills, and real world experience.

Microprocessors, 3D printers and drones have been the heroes of the maker movement, but they’ve also renewed interest in all sorts of resources that are just as useful: wood shops and metal shops, paper craft and home ec, and all the programs in math and science and computer programming that already exist.

But even more importantly, they’ve built excitement around a method of learning and growing into the best version of ourselves, whose power we’re only beginning to uncover.

Resources: **www.edutopia.org/blog/maker-movement-moving-into-classrooms-vicki-davis www.weareteachers.com/blogs/post/2015/04/03/how-the-maker-movement-is-transforming-education makered.org