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...