Through Their Eyes

As a back to school activity, I had the 3rd and 4th grade classes brainstorm a list of words to describe the Makerspace.  I combined the lists and put them into Wordle.net to generate a word cloud.  What I got back speaks volumes.  For those not familiar with word clouds, they are visual representations of a text selection.  Unless specifically excluded, all words that show up in the entered text appear somewhere in the design, with words that were entered more frequently showing up larger in the design.  So for these word clouds, the biggest words in each design are words that showed up the most when they were brainstorming - words like FUN, TEAMWORK, LEARNING, TECH, CHALLENGE, BUILD.  It says a lot about how they perceive what we're doing in here, and it validates that they're getting the very things out of it that we'd hoped.

Check out this video of their word clouds!