Posts by educators and repair advocates involved in teaching youth about repair. Their vision, advice, recountings and reflections about what they did, how they did it, and what they experienced.
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Zoe explains the thinking behind their Repair Kits: Transform how children engage with science and technology through fixing real objects. Home kits include a strategically broken gadget, tools, parts and repair guides. Classroom kits also include worksheets, lesson plans and more.
Megan and Debbie recount how experience with their local Repair Café led them to establish a Repair Club, then to develop Fix It Carts to cultivate a repair mindset in their K - 8 schools.
Burke’s School in San Francisco, California, reports on Jimmy Santosa’s repair unit and repair event in his makerspace classroom. Through hands-on fixing, Jimmy’s third graders learned about how things are made, the value of repair, and repair’s role in environmental sustainability.
Sam writes about Oakland Tech Repair, a program in Oakland Unified School District where student interns have repaired some 10,000 Chromebooks over the last five years. They’ve learned technical skills, earned industry certification, gained workplace skills, and saved the school district $2.4 million along the way.
Julie describes the origins and growth of the terrific Riot Refurb program. High school students refurbish and repair scavenged obsolete and broken devices — addressing e-waste, technology equity, technical and workplace training, and more.
The iFixit Education Team writes that teaching our youth about repair is a critical channel for advancing repair. iFixit offers considerable support for K-12 educators and runs a robust Technical Writing Program for university students.
Ellen writes about a two-part program integrating repair into the middle-school STEM / Makerspace curriculum and hosting community repair events.
Gloria writes about hosting Fix It Fests during STEAM class, integrating repair with environmental issues through research, instructional, and hands-on learning, supported by community volunteers.
Algalita’s mission is to eliminate plastic pollution through education and research. Emily writes about how the organization has integrated repair into their in-class and afterschool programming.
New pedagogical tools, grounded in repairing broken objects.
Excerpts from the “Toolkit”, a teaching resource developed by a collaboration among Agency by Design Oakland, Maker Ed, and The Culture of Repair Project.
The vision underlying the Student-Led Repair Shop.
Excerpts from Fixing Things for the Future, a handbook published by the Rudolf Steiner School in Munich-Schwabing, Germany.
Kimberley’s workshops demonstrate how repair brings critical thinking, real-world problem-solving, and basic physics concepts into the classroom, while also making space for urgent conversations like caring for the environment.