BENTONVILLE -- The School District and the Scott Family Amazeum bonded Thursday over a mutual interest in learning and tinkering.
Students at Willowbrook Elementary School signed a "Declaration of Innovation" symbolizing a partnership between the district and the new museum. The declaration states it serves to secure "the empowerment of students to learn through unique, engaging experiences that require high levels of collaboration, problem-solving, creativity, critical thinking and communication."
About the Amazeum
The Scott Family Amazeum will open at 10 a.m. July 15 at 1009 Museum Way in Bentonville. The nearly 50,000-square-foot facility is next door to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and across the street from Orchards Park. The Amazeum will open with about 15 full-time staff members and between 30 and 40 part-time staff members, according to Dana Engelbert, marketing manager. Museum hours and admission prices will be announced soon, Engelbert said.
Source: Staff report
Tied into Thursday's event was the presentation of a "tinkering cart," a gift to Leah Cheek's second-grade class from this year's Leadership Benton County class.
The wooden cart loaded with tools, beads, goggles, cups, paper, pipe cleaners and more is intended to enhance Cheek's classroom and give students a place to store the various items they need for their tinkering-related activities.
Tinkering is the term used to describe activities in which people explore and take apart materials, often to create new items. Cheek is among those Bentonville teachers who have strongly embraced tinkering as a teaching method.
Landon Nobles said he and others from this year's Leadership Benton County class approached Amazeum officials for help in figuring out a project they could do that involved education.
"They introduced us to tinkering," Nobles said.
Leadership Benton County class members built and stocked two tinkering carts -- one for Cheek and the other for Carrie Beach, a science teacher at Washington Junior High School. Cheek and Beach were chosen because of their dedication to tinkering, Nobles said.
Leadership Benton County is an organization that seeks to develop community leaders and promote awareness of all facets of the region. Each class takes on some kind of service project.
Cheek said she found out in January she'd be getting one of the carts. She was consulted for her input in how the cart should be designed, she said.
"When you have volunteers like the people who have committed their time to Leadership Benton County and the professionals at the Amazeum who want to come together and help kids do real learning, it's just amazing," Cheek said. "I'm extremely thankful and beyond excited for the opportunities ahead."
Sam Dean, executive director of the Amazeum, told students the museum will include a Tinkering Hub, sponsored by 3M.
"You guys like to make stuff?" Dean said to several classes of Willowbrook students assembled in the school's courtyard.
"Yeah!" the students shouted back.
Dean quoted Thomas Edison, who said to invent things, all you need is "a good imagination and a pile of junk."
Addison Guess, a Willowbrook fourth-grader, said tinkering was part of the work she and other Willowbrook students did this school year. In the fall they sold Christmas ornaments they had made from old electronic equipment. The money they raised went to a nonprofit organization that provides access to clean water to communities in sub-Saharan Africa.
"You get to be creative," Addison said about tinkering. "It can give you an education that might get you a good job."
She was impressed by the tinkering cart.
"They must have spent a lot of time making this," she said.
The Declaration of Innovation came about as a result of conversations between district and Amazeum officials on how they could formalize their relationship, said Dana Engelbert, Amazeum's marketing manager. The Amazeum would love to have similar relationships with other school districts in the area, she said.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all students are creative and endowed with certain unalienable rights to learn through inquiry and wonder, with creativity and passion, through making and tinkering, trying and doing," the declaration reads, in part.
It also states, "Learning is messy" and "Great discoveries often happen by accident, but never happen without getting hands on and head engaged."
Students attached sticky notes with their names on them to the declaration, which had been written out on poster-sized sheets of paper.
NW News on 05/29/2015