As technology continually advances, there are more opportunities than ever for students to learn outside of the traditional classroom setting. Media Specialist Diana Rendina has found a way to offer this at Tampa Prep through Maker Mondays.

         Maker Mondays, which take place Mondays after school in the library, is a time when students can delve into new subjects or create projects. Previous projects have included intro to 3D printing and intro to virtual reality, but also more hands on projects like creating recycled book art or paper circuits. This allows students to look into new interests to determine if they wish to pursue the topic further. Freshman, Ryan Kelly, a frequent participant at Maker Mondays said, “With Maker Mondays, I’ve been able to see what’s compatible with VR, but then I can also go to VR club.”

Rendina spent the seven years before joining Tampa Prep at a STEM based school where

she noticed a lack of space to create for students. “I wanted to find a way to bring that kind of hands on, stem learning,” by  incorporating a makerspace, which is, “a space in our library where kids would come in and work on projects and we had a makers club where we would kind of do design thinking and stuff like that,” Rendina said.

While Maker Mondays have created a great opportunity for students to learn through more abstract concepts, “I feel like it’s still kind of in the beta stages, were still kind of exploring what students are going to be interested in,” Rendina said.

Makerspaces allow students to work on creative thinking more often within

school and are becoming consistently more popular. According to a study done in 2016, since 2006, there are more than 14 times more makerspaces and this could be a future part of Tampa Prep. “Definitely, my hope would be that in the longer term, it would become it bigger part of the library, as opposed to just having it after school one day a week, where we could have a little makerspace in the library that students could use,” Rendina said. Kelly agrees, “Maker Mondays are a great place for students to be creative and tinker with things they might not otherwise have the chance to do,” also stating that Tampa Prep should consider incorporating a makerspace.

Makerspaces have progressed vastly recently, significantly due to the increased

use of technology in schools, and will likely continue to become more popular in schools, which poses the question, what will become of Maker Monday’s, and will this lead towards the creation of a makerspace?