Urban Assembly Maker Academy

The Urban Assembly Maker Academy (UA Maker) is a CTE (career and technical education) school inspired by the maker movement, which promotes the use of technology and design principles to solve everyday problems. The school opened in September 2014 with strong partnerships with Intersection, a design firm that helped develop the maker components of the curriculum, Parsons School of Design and Spring Point Schools, which helped design the school and provided start-up funds.

Founding principal Luke Bauer is well-regarded by teachers based on their responses to the NYC School Survey. Prior to opening UA Maker, Bauer was the director of professional development at Odell Education an organization that develops literacy curricula. He as taught high school and middle school social studies for many years, first in Kansas and then as a teacher and assistant principal at East Bronx Academy for the Future.

All students at UA Maker take a full load of academic classes in addition to learning design and related skills. Ninth-graders take a foundations course and beginning in 10th grade students are introduced to a range of topics such as digital animation, video game programing, Python coding language, design, protying, and finance.

A lot of the hands-on design work takes place in the school’s maker lab, a large open space equipped with heavy-duty equipment such as laser and vinyl cutters and 3-D printers.

The school has put in place measures, such as a generous after-school tutoring program, to ensure all students get individual attention and the opportunity to work at their own pace and skill level. Students also participate in a four-year advisory program covering grade-specific issues. For example, freshmen advisory focuses on the school’s core values and understanding the design process, while junior advisory addresses college admissions.

All freshmen take an applied physics course that emphasizes more design concepts and hands-on learning than the standard Regents physics curriculum. and either algebra or geometry, depending on their incoming skill level. In the upper grades there are some Advanced Placement classes and College Now courses in conjunction with several CUNY schools.

To help all students keep up with instruction in English, teachers rely on differentiated texts (middle-, high school- and college- level) covering the same topics of study.

Since students take maker-themed classes every semester, there is little room in their schedule for non-maker themed elective classes. Typical of many CTE (career and technical education schools), foreign language instruction is limited to one year. Students learn Spanish.

UA Maker is housed in the Murry Bergtraum High School building, which is home to the Manhattan Early College School for Advertising and Urban Assembly School for Emergency Management. In addition to school-run after-school activities students from all schools in the building may participate in campus-wide sports teams.

SPECIAL EDUCATION: The school has ICT (integrated co-teaching) classes and SETSS (special education teacher support services).

ADMISSIONS: Admissions is based on the educational option formula, which seeks a range of low-, middle- and high-performing students. (Laura Zingmond, web reports, December 2018)