When students at Gretna Green School (new window)’s Gator Designs extracurricular maker club learned they would be building switches for kids with disabilities for our Hacking for the Holidays (new window) campaign, they felt inspired to take it one step further.

“They wanted to try to raise some funds,” explains Angela McQuaid Murphy, who teaches grade 7 and 8 French Immersion math and science at Gretna Green. “The kids actually went down themselves and spoke to our principal and asked if they could do a pyjama day. They created some stickers that said Gator Designs and ‘I support Neil Squire.’ They printed those off in our work room and cut them all up. We had lots of kids involved doing it. It was great because it got them all excited about your organization and helping.”

The students ran in-school video announcements promoting the pyjama day, and when kids donated, they received one of the stickers they created. Their efforts resulted in $525.50 raised towards Hacking for the Holidays.

After, on October 22^nd, 67 Gretna Green students — including many students who are not even in the club — participated in a switch-building workshop run by Grace Sanford, one of our Co-op STEM Event Leaders. Learning hands-on STEM skills along the way, the students built raindrop, low profile, light touch, and interact switches, and they even did some quality control on switches built at previous events.

“A lot of kids were learning a new skill, like how to solder, and they had never done that before,” says Tyler Turcotte, who teaches grades 6-8 language arts, social studies, and math and science. “We had a lot of different groups in here on that day. Everybody was focused on the same task.”

“The kids really enjoyed working with Grace, and for them, it was really authentic learning because it was an engineer that came and spent time with them. They were learning skills and then they could see something tangible being built. Not only learning maker skills, but learning how to give back,” says Angela. “She was just fabulous with them. She had a great pace. She sat down and I asked her if she could do a demo of the soldering. The kids just swarmed around her as she was a superstar in their eyes. She was so patient with them, but then also challenging them. She had a really nice way with the kids. She was a really good teacher.”

The teachers particularly appreciated the camaraderie of the students during the build event.

“When some of the kids who did not have the fine motor skills needed and were having trouble, another kid was like, ‘Oh, I’ll help you.’ My teacher heart was full seeing [that],” Angela says. “There was a lot of pride I saw in the kids and a lot of helping each other.”

“It’s a lot of good teamwork and collaboration that was happening in here,” Tyler says. “It kind of hit close to home because we can think of students in our own building that would benefit from the accessibility. [. . .] It seemed to encourage them even more.”

And now that the build event is done, the students want to continue building Makers Making Change (new window) devices using the 3D printers at their school.

“We’re always looking for ways that we can teach the kids some empathy and teach them to give back to their community. And your organization fit really well with that,” says Angela.

“It’s really nice to see the kids engaged and helping each other and wanting to give back.”

This post originally appeared on the Makers Making Change (new window) website.