System Upgrade
Empowering educators with innovative tools and resources to redefine learning and create impactful, future-ready education for a changing world.
Redefining Education
The System Upgrade initiative equips educators with tools and resources to revolutionize education, disrupt outdated standards, and deliver impactful, relevant content across diverse fields.
SHTEAM Labs Activities
Documenting our journey, one lesson at a time.
The SHTEAM Labs Activities Journals are our latest collection of lesson plans, student reflections, and activity guides — custom-tailored resources designed for particular classrooms. They're also the activities powering our newest STEAM programs at Ulloa and Sunset Elementary Schools in the San Francisco Unified School District, where each journal is shaped around the specific needs of its community.
Our partnership with SFUSD has brought makerspace sessions to about 900 students over three years running. We work openly with teachers, giving them the option to adopt any of our practices or equipment into their own classrooms, and we make sure each school has a clear idea of what to expect from the program so they can carry the institutional knowledge forward after we've moved on. Each school partnership is shaped around that community's own goals.
You might find they suit your classroom as well.
Browse SHTEAM Labs Resources
Living Lessons Demo, Not Live
Living Lessons is our new projected teaching and skill-tracking system for SteamHead makerspace classes, replacing linear slide decks with an interactive classroom display built around our Design Immersion skill badges. What's linked below is an early design prototype with sample class data, not the live product.
View the Demo
SteamHead Productions
We launched SteamHead Productions to capture and share the stories of our students, and to pass our accumulated knowledge on to educators worldwide. Working with Cultivative and media director Mike Shaw, it has grown into a full publishing platform — runway films, class documentaries, and teacher resources on YouTube, with life from the programs on Instagram.
MakeFashion Edu Online Course
The MakeFashion Edu Online Course lives on the MakeFashion Edu page — its primary home. We keep it here too, as one entry in our compiled toolkit of tools and content for educators, alongside the Design Immersion Curriculum and The Shelf.
Visit MakeFashion Edu
The Design Immersion Curriculum
The SteamHead Design Immersion Curriculum is the foundation under everything on this page: a holistic program that embeds design thinking and maker skills across subjects, developed through years of classroom implementation and published openly for any school to use.
To put the curriculum to work in the classroom, the Maker Badges on The Shelf implement its learning pathways — a concrete way for teachers to measure and reward student progress by actions taken, not facts memorized.
Read the Curriculum OverviewFast Publishing
Making great things is only half the story — the other half is telling it. Fast Publishing is our newest experiment: we're using LLM systems to handle the technical side of getting blog posts written up, formatted, and published, so the projects and lessons coming out of our classrooms reach the community while the hot glue is still warm.
It also means we can share educational content by publishing on our own site, without relying entirely on social media networks to get the word out. We find that genuinely exciting — and very much worth attempting. As always, a human reviews every post before it goes live.
Read the Great Things BlogJoin the Conversation
Educators, did you know that Hackers are lifelong learners contributing educational content to their communities? Hackers, did you know teachers from Kindergarten through University are advocating for the skills and values in your makerspaces to be brought into schools?
Join us online to discuss and support each other. No experience required — all levels of Educators and Hackers welcome.
Get Involved