Playing in the Sandbox With Dale Dougherty

Last week I attended Sandbox Summit, a conference at MIT that gathers great thinkers in children’s media. This year’s theme was was about nurturing kids’ imagination in the digital age, which stood in sharp contrast to the events unfolding in Boston while we were there. Instead of gluing ourselves to the news, we pressed on with the conference. It was so reassuring to talk about inspiring kids and the good that we can do through media.

There are a ton of things that I’m still processing, but one thing I wanted to be sure to share with my fellow GeekMoms is the closing keynote from Dale Dougherty, Founding Editor and Publisher of Make Magazine (thanks to Scott Traylor of 360Kid for filming it). The way Dougherty talked about makers is the way we often talk about geeks here at GeekMom–people who are passionate about something and love to find a community to share that passion with. He also talked about the DIY movement, not as in “hey, you can make something” but as in “hey, you can make something.” Let’s all be makers. More importantly, let’s get our kids to be makers. Dougherty talks about the importance of maker spaces in schools, and I couldn’t be more in favor. Watch the video and learn more at the Maker Education Initiative.