Greetings & Salutations

I am very excited at what lies ahead this year as being a part of the 2016-2017 Foundry Makerspace Fellow cohort. I join two other Fellows, Brendan O'Neill and Shaina Carter for this academic year.

My connection with the Foundry began in 2014 when I reached out to discuss my involvement in a personal Minecraft project - Midtown Minecraft.

Since that time, I've been working on the model little by little. My interest in the project started from an interest that my two daughters had with the software. I was amazed at how quickly they picked up the game mechanics and were very creative in their crafting.

My background is in architecture and urban design so I am fascinated with Minecraft as a design tool for everyone. If students can better understand their neighborhood, the built environment, they may become more engaged with the process as adults. I find that far too often the visual thinking / design thinking is left behind in the educational process. This is the number one discussion during the first year of architecture school. A student must reconnect with a visual language, which sometimes lies dormant in the block playing (LEGOs, Lincoln Logs) and structure building (Erector Sets, K'Nex) of their childhood.

Apart from architecture, city & community development, and Minecraft, I also enjoy all types of technology. I enjoy learning how to harness the technology to create new things. This is the essence of a makerspace. The time spent in tinkering allows one to be creative, but also make the connections with theories that may be abstract. The abstract qualities of physics, chemistry, and math can be tied together in a humanistic kind of way. I hope to bring my experience with problem solving and communication into the makerspace programming to help students translate what is in their heads to tangible projects that exhibit learning.

With my experience teaching college level architecture classes at HACC and providing teen mentoring at the Neighborhood Center, I see the need for 21st Century skills. I think these are summed up in two key areas - Problem Solving and Communication. Students need to be able to assess an issue and break it down into the smaller steps. Sometimes this becomes a roadblock and immobilization strikes. Connected to that is the ability to communicate ideas to others and also work as a collaborator. Our world is becoming increasingly smaller with technology and it is more diverse. Being able to translate the ideas in your head so that someone else might be able to understand them is critical to future leaders - leaders in one's family, school, work, or neighborhood.

Finally these tow things connects, at a larger level, to one's purpose in life. My favorite quote is attributed to an anonymous author, "the two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you figure out why." I think this is the great quest in life; to find out the connection between these two days.

As I grow older, I find that this is a lifelong process.

Mr. Rob