For my older son’s fifth birthday, my brother purchased the 600+ piece Ninjago Lego set that his (then only) nephew most wanted. Like my brother before him, my son loved (and still does) amassing the specific superhero, ninja, and droid figurines that come with such sets. As for the hundreds of other pieces in that particular box? My son opened all seven bags, followed all 150 steps in two different instruction books, and spent an entire weekend building an enormous ship, only to take the whole thing apart come Monday afternoon. As his Type-A mom, it’s entirely possible I felt the sting of tears at the corners of my eyes as I witnessed the mess of bricks where there had once been a masterpiece. When asked why he decided to take it all apart, he looked at me and answered, “because I can make a way cooler ship, Mommy,” just as if he were telling me the sky is blue.
As we grow up, some of us shed the innate creative impulse of our childhoods. For many of us, that shedding begins while we’re still kids--by the time I was in second grade, my mom says I had “decided” I wasn’t good at art because I couldn’t make my drawing of a frog look like an actual frog. Tinkering and experimenting on the piano keys was something my brother and I did before our lessons, not during them. Unless you grew up watching someone cook without consulting a recipe or listening to someone learn to play guitar by ear, you may, like me, begin to notice that your creativity was stifled by trying to make things that had already been tasted, seen, or heard. Makerspaces, on the other hand, provide us the freedom to sit down, imagine, and iterate until we bring an idea to life. Students don’t have to spend time trying to break the mold in their endeavors because there is no mold. With the grand opening of the FSH makerspace, we have the opportunity to celebrate how the bedrocks of an FSH education--creativity, critical thinking, and the freedom of exploration--intersect with the 21st-century demand for design-thinking and innovation.
We are beyond grateful to the organizations and people that helped us turn this idea into a reality. I want to thank Peter Evans and the SNAVE Foundation for the generous grant that funded this project. Thank you to Terence Ryan, Ken Sands, Rod Wolfson, Michael Zimmerman, and all the members of our Property Committee, past and present, who worked tirelessly on both the vision and the details of this space. Thanks, too, to Courtney Wickware, our Science teacher, who has spent the beginning of her tenure here bringing this space to life and infusing it with an understanding of our school’s ethos. The makerspace isn’t like any of the other classrooms at FSH, but it will, like all that happens here, inspire new ideas in our next generation of thinkers.