Our first podcast from the "Song of Myself" project at Design Lab Early College High School in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. This project is a collaboration between Design Lab ECHS, Young Troubled Minds, and Ingenuity Cleveland.

Song For Myself Podcast - Episode 1

What is all of this about WikiSeat’s and Catalysts?

WikiSeat started as an open source furniture design platform, and has since evolved to be a maker education initiative. WikiSeat is a way in which anybody can experience creation, for themselves, in any setting. This project aspires to help students grasp and explore four key concepts: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication. Otherwise known as the 4 C’s of 21st century education. These are the types of things that engage human beings, and inspire them to aim for more than what they are given.

This maker education initiative is a way to fulfill a very real need found today, the need for tangible, ill-structured problems for students to grapple with in the classroom, that require little or no special training on the educators part. This is one solution out of many. This is the one we feel most passionate about.

In the past three weeks, WikiSeat has grown from three classes total in Ohio and Arizona with around 200 students, to over 100 classes with over 5,000 students from all over the world. It is rare that you see this size of a response to projects like this, and it appears that our “Call to Action” really hit a cord with a lot of teachers out there. 

Shortly after posting, we received emails from all sorts of teachers asking if they could do the WikiSeat project in their classes. For the next week or so, also after a little bit of publicity by Will Richardson on his blog and David Pescovitz on BoingBoing, we were receiving an email every hour it seemed. The sheer number of people who have shown interest in using this project has been exhilarating, inspiring, and sometimes a bit overwhelming.

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