A few of my favorites: I absolutely love Makey Makey. I love Raspberry Pi, and I love cardboard. The reason I love those three things is because they’re so open-ended. Raspberry Pi can be used as a micro controller for a hydroponic gardening system, a door alarm, or I can turn it into an Alexa, but I can also use it as a computer. I can build on that computer. One of my Raspberry Pis is an arcade machine, another one is running the Chrome operating system, so I essentially made my own Chromebook. Or, hook up an old monitor to a Raspberry Pi and make a digital bulletin board.

You’re really only limited by your creativity. There are some products where, if you want to use this function, you have to learn their software. If you want to control this robot, you have to learn the company’s programming language. It might be a great tool, but where it falls short, compared to the other open-ended ones, is the transference. I might master how to control this robot using your proprietary programming language, but how am I ever going to use that beyond that specific robot? I want to be able to take those skills and apply them to something else.

I love cardboard because there is such a low threshold. People will look at Raspberry Pi and be intimidated, but they look at cardboard and there is no intimidation. It’s a prototyping tool. But I can bring in LEDs, micro controllers, and motors and build my own robot. And it’s cheap and it’s everywhere. It’s a blank slate.

Favorite People and Organizations

Lifelong Kindergarten: A research group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, headed by Mitch Resnick, who created the simple Scratch programming language. Resnick has published a book called Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity Through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play (MIT Press, 2017).

Novel Engineering: An education approach for elementary and middle school students that integrates engineering and literacy. “Students look at picture books or early chapter books and identify problems that happen in the story, and then design solutions based on the constraints of the story setting, and timeline,” Lister says. “It ties making to literacy. When I show this to teachers, they say, ‘I can do that!’ Once students solve the problem, they’re asked how that changes the story, and then that becomes a writing prompt. I love approaches like that.”

Todd Burleson: Resource center director at the Hubbard Woods School in Winnetka, Ill., is at the heart of a makerspace called the IDEA Lab. “His projects are amazing,” Lister notes. Burleson was recognized for his making expertise and other accomplishments when he was named 2016 School Library Journal School Librarian of the Year.