Travis Sluss

MakeInspires Team Building at LinkedIn Last week, the MakeInspires team had the opportunity to bring one of our favorite hands-on challenges into a completely new environment: LinkedIn’s Hack Week in NYC, hosted inside the Empire State Building. Instead of laptops and whiteboards, teams gathered around LEGO robotics kits, tasked with designing, building, and programming a working catapult. The goal was simple: collaborate, iterate, and see whose creation could launch the farthest and most...

For fifteen years MakeInspires has used Scratch as a foundational tool in our STEAM programs. Scratch has consistently empowered young people to build, imagine, collaborate, and problem-solve in ways that deepen their understanding of both coding and the world around them. Recently, a peer-reviewed study examined how Scratch-based activities integrated into the 5E Learning Model impacted 6th-grade students’ computational thinking skills, programming self-efficacy, and overall attitudes toward...

Artificial Intelligence is rapidly transforming how young people learn, imagine, and solve problems. This is prompting a vital question for educators and families alike: How do we harness AI in a way that strengthens rather than replaces children’s creativity, agency, and collaboration?   This question lies at the heart of MIT researcher Mitchel Resnick’s influential essay, “Generative AI and Creative Learning: Concerns, Opportunities, and Choices,”  where he argues that we must make...