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Try the Toolkit: Superpower Hour

Guiding Questions:

  • How do we build a shared understanding of the constructs we care about in our learning community?

Activity Duration: 1 hour

Superpower Hour is an activity aimed to help classes build a collective understanding of the Maker Elements and practice identifying them by learning about real inventors. It helps show students why the Maker Elements are something they should care about, and how real people use them as skills to do important work. Over time you will build your skills around including students in the maker assessment process, and Superpower Hour can be one of the first steps of building a shared understanding of the Maker Elements in your learning community. Download the full Superpower Hour Teachers Guide.

In this activity, small groups of students are given a superpower story in varying formats. A superpower story is a true story of an inventor, author, artist, engineer, or scientist that describes their path to one discovery or contribution. The stories exemplify one or more of the Maker Elements in the context of a real person. Groups work through the story together identifying where they see instances of the superpowers (Maker Elements). Through this process, they will discuss what does and doesn’t count as each superpower, building their own understanding of what that skill looks like in practice.

For each superpower they recognize in their story, groups will add a piece to the cape they are constructing. At the end, the different capes can be used as the start of a larger, full class conversation about what each of the Maker Elements look like in action.

When leading this activity in your classroom, you will want to tailor the competencies (or Maker Elements) and the selected story for your context. For instance, you can see how the activity was framed for a group of students in a summer STEAM camp in this slide deck. We have chosen two Maker Elements and an inventor story to use as you try it together with colleagues:

  • Social Scaffolding: The capacity to support and be supported by others by asking for help, giving feedback, sharing tips and tricks, or building on and remixing each other’s work, even if you are working on different projects.
  • Troubleshooting: A capacity to persist and to find solutions. If a project is not progressing as expected, you can use different strategies to diagnose and fix the problem. Not giving up requires patience, resilience, and resourcefulness as well as an investment in what you are working on.

Before You Begin

  • Collect the following materials:
    • Writing & drawing tools
    • Scissors
    • Tape
    • Fabric or felt
    • Other craft materials to create capes
    • Stuffed animals or puppets to wear the capes (optional)
    • Maker Element Posters
  • Assign roles:
    • Facilitator: will guide participants through the steps in the process.
    • Time-keeper: will keep track of time for each step in the process.

Facilitation Guide

Warm-up (10 min)

  1. Each person in the group should think of 1-3 household inventions (such as an appliance, tool, or object) and write them on individual slips of paper and put them into a basket or cup. Think broadly about inventions, including high-tech tools such as your smartphone, laptop, and the internet, but also paperclips, bar codes, or doorknobs.
  2. The first person takes the basket, and randomly selects one of the items.
  3. Read it to yourself and without words, act it out for the rest of your group to guess.
  4. Once someone guesses correctly, pass the basket to the next person and continue till everyone has had a chance to act or until the basket is empty.

Maker Superpowers (50 min)

  1. Pick one of the inventions from the basket and have a short conversation (5 min):
    • What special skills or mindsets did the person or team who invented it have?
    • Referring to the Maker Elements posters for Social Scaffolding and Troubleshooting, how might these skills have been used in developing the invention?
  2. Now watch the story of Victoria Velez, biomedical engineer. As you watch, write down examples of the two Maker Elements that you hear in Victoria’s story.
  3. As a small group, or working individually, create a superhero cape for Victoria. The cape should represent how Victoria uses Social Scaffolding* and Troubleshooting. (15 min)
  4. Share your capes with the group and discuss (15 min):
    • What is similar about the different capes? What is different?
    • What do the capes say about the group’s ideas about the Maker Elements?
    • When is a time that you used one of these Maker Elements?
    • When have you seen your students demonstrate these Maker Elements?
  5. Planning for next steps (10 min):
    • Individually journal:
      • What about Superpower Hour and Setting Context around maker skills with your students excites you?
      • What makes you nervous? What support will you need?
    • With a partner:
      • Share what you journaled about.
      • How might you support each other to implement Setting Context in your classroom or programs?

Next Steps

  • Pick a skill or mindset that you hope to develop through your makerspace or maker centered classroom. It may be one of the Maker Elements from the Beyond Rubrics Toolkit, something from your district’s graduate profile or the vision of your maker program.
  • Facilitate Superpower Hour with your students. You can find additional inventor stories in the Beyond Rubrics Toolkit or curate your own set of local or global STEAM superheroes that your students will connect with.
  • When you next meet with this group, discuss how the activity went with your students.
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