KQED News Mind/Shift – Katrina Schwartz
“Screen time for young children has been a hotly contested debate among parents for years. Many worry that passive consumption of media through screens harms young children’s brain development, or at the very least means they are getting less interaction with caregivers, other children and hands-on play. On the other hand, most children under the age of 8 have access to a mobile device in the home and it can be hard to enforce an absolutely-no-screen-time rule. The Bay Area Discovery Museum, which focuses on hands-on, play-based learning, is trying to introduce a more active kind of technology use with the first Fab Lab for kids ages 3 and up. The Discovery Museum is open to families and partners with schools to bring schoolchildren to the museum in coordination with a multi-part visiting structure to help bring hands-on, creative learning back into the classroom. In contrast to a makerspace, which is a more free-form experience of making, the Fab Lab that museum educators are designing is explicitly connected to the ideas of design and engineering and connects to the Next Generation Science Standards.”(more)