About

Announcing this year’s fellows!

Click to view all of the amazing Baden Academy Media Lab fellowship projects during past years!

2018-19 Highlights

2017-18 Highlights

2016-17 Highlights

About our Lab

The Baden Academy Charter School Media Lab is a center for creative inquiry, experimentation, and discovery. The Lab’s innovative research approaches empower a community of learners to bring to fruition real world projects that benefit the entire community. It is located on the first floor at Baden Academy Charter School.

The Lab is an atmosphere unconstrained by traditional disciplines and supports cross discipline efforts to generate worthy ideas, engage in critical research, prototype using out of the box thinking, imagineer great design and beauty, reflect on the skills and relationships built, and creatively present the fruits of project/passion based learning.

The Lab takes its cue from several ground-breaking innovation labs around the country.

CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center’s interdisciplinary approach to combine technology and fine arts with a focus to produce artifacts that are intended to entertain, inform, inspire, or otherwise affect others.
CMU’s CREATE Lab’s mission to empower technological fluency and create socially meaningful innovation and deployment of robotic technologies and electronic prototyping.
The d.school at Stanford focus on alternative methods of problem solving and allowing the type of problem we want to solve shape how we should use the tools of design thinking.
The MIT Media Lab’s ground-breaking antidisciplinary approach to the development of systems to improve the way people live, learn, express themselves, work and play.

Students are encouraged to take risks, pull others across perceived boundaries, and engage all members of our learning community – administration, teachers, and students alike – to discover and apply new possibilities for advancing our mission.

Thinking, working, and learning both “outside the box” and “beyond the clock” of the traditional public school model, students and faculty working in the Lab apply unorthodox learning, teaching and research strategies to envision innovative solutions for overcoming barriers to education success and achievement.

Research Fellows Program

Beginning on Grade 3, Baden Academy Charter School students have the opportunity to apply to serve as a Research Fellow in the Media Lab. Fellowships are year long projects (meeting about 60 minutes a week) that enable a student, group of students, teacher, or classroom to write a book, create a digital artefact, or compete in a national or international STEM competition. Fellowships end in an artefact (digital artifact) worthy of portfolios, college (or grant) applications. Students have mentioned that the world seems so much bigger to them after they finish a fellowship. You are invited to apply to become one of these Research Fellows and work to become a STEM Athlete, Digital Storyteller, and World Changer. Research Fellows are supported to design robust and creative inquiries into new STEM frontiers that ignite their passion and celebrate their unique brilliance. They produce meaningful projects and unique contributions that don’t simply add to their resume but engage them as autonomous and purposeful learners.We help you pick your topic! Fellows choose from diverse fields of study which pique their imaginations and resonate with their unique talents and individual passions. Their real-world project suggestions must make valuable contributions to the community that will be shared and disseminated with published materials, digital artifacts, competition entries, and teaching opportunities. A discussion with a fellowship coordinator allows us a chance to partner your interests with real world scientists, charitable organizations, and successful entrepreneurs looking to support students pursuing STEM.Once accepted into the program, research fellows engage in projects that instill and strengthen a 21^st-Century skill set of innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, emotional intelligence, resilience, leadership, and vision. A statement of goals and objectives is developed that identifies and applies skills and insights from multiple fields of study (e.g. science, technology, engineering, math, robotics, game design, medicine, energy, entrepreneurship, and leadership). Research Fellows will meet weekly in small groups in the Baden Academy Media Lab for discovery and collaboration. An annual STEM Family Night marks the celebration of accomplished goals and a time to pause, evaluate and redesign goals for the future.