The end goal is to help kids to become creators of their own type. These mindset ideas are critical to getting there. These ideas need to be deeply learned. When I first had a Fab Lab as a classroom, I thought it would be somewhat easy to jump-start the creators in our building. It was not. I did not anticipate how difficult it would be. The kids wanted to get there but there are so many obstacles in the way. Their mindsets, past experiences, negative self-talk, lack of grit, and poor habits made a mental minefield to cross. It was easy to help kids make a cool project; We do cool projects all the time at school.  It was very, very hard to help them become self-guided creators.

During the first years, I did not teach the lessons in this chapter well. They were random and disjointed. A big part of the problem was that there was no way to organize or repeat these lessons. They needed to be the core of the class. This struggle ended with the development of the Creator Cycle.

I can barely keep my eyes open tonight, so a picture introduction will have to do: