Sparta — What did students in Ericka McKellar’s eighth-grade STEM class see when they looked at the underutilized two-level library adjacent to their classroom?
Opportunity.
As part of a project last semester, the class reimagined the library area at Sparta Middle School as a makerspace — a collaborative area where students can gather and work on projects, and where educators can make use of project-based learning opportunities.
“They had to redesign this space to make it more usable for students,” McKellar said, noting that the students shuffled tables around, got rid of extra furniture, and opened up the library to turn it into a usable group space.
With classroom libraries growing in popularity, the actual library itself was getting less and less attention, McKellar said. So it made sense to transform the space into something that would be more…
