January 04th, 2016

Safety In Elementary Making

Often I get asked for recommendations on how elementary making areas can be safer.  The debate between exploration/freedom and liability is tricky.  However, I believe that there can be safe exploration.  Elementary makers have to operate differently from middle and high school maker areas due to the ages of the students.

You can find safety rulers on amazon.com   I do a ton of scoring on cardboard to get students started and then have them finish off the cutting.  (I learned this trick when I attended Maker Educator Bootcamp which was awesome:  https://pittsburghkids.org/education/maker-educator-bootcamp )

Caution tape makes it easy to define 'hot' areas.  Everything is still open for students to use however they know that when something they need to use is beyond the caution tape they should ask for adult backup.

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Which version is safer?

We try to teach the student to look for safety issues in our lab and either report them immediately or fix the issue.

Hand drills...remember the ones without batteries?  These are great to encourage elementary students to SLOW DOWN.

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