Makerspaces in Education

What is a Makerspace?

A makerspace is a room that contains tools and components, allowing people to enter with an idea and leave with a complete project. The best part is that makerspaces are communal. The goal is to work together to learn, collaborate, and share. Most importantly, makerspaces allow us to explore, create new things, or improve things that already exist.

Successful makerspaces need to be intentionally managed, with someone responsible for maintain supplies of tools, materials, and software.

In addition, because most makers in a school makerspace are often novices in terms of technical skills, successful maker activities have an adequate number of mentors that can circulate and assist. These can be both adults and older students.

Adapted from Start Making! by Alisha Panjwani:

Principle 1: Support learning through design experiences. A maker program is based on the idea that people learn best when they are engaged in creating personally meaningful products. As young people work on projects, they can be seen as engaging in a design process, which we call a “creative learning spiral”. In this process, they imagine what they want to do, create a project based on their ideas, play with alternatives, share their ideas and creations with others, and reflect on their experiences— all of which lead them to imagine new ideas and new projects. As youth engage in these experiences, they learn valuable technical skills while also learning about the process of design and invention.

Principle 2: Help youth build their interests. When young people care about what they are working on, they are willing to work longer and harder, and they learn more in the process. Many youth begin by mimicking a sample project, then work on variations on the theme, and soon develop their own personal path, stemming from their personal interests.

Principle 3: Develop a sense of community. Makerspaces are designed to develop a learning community in which youth share ideas and work together on projects. Facilitators play an important role not just in supporting youth, but also by modeling the process of making and learning themselves.

Principle 4: Foster an environment of respect and trust. Young people are treated with trust and respect—and are expected to treat others the same way. Facilitators strive to create an environment in which participants feel safe to experiment, explore, and innovate.

Maker Culture

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The maker culture is a contemporary subculture representing a technology-based extension of DIY culture^[ that intersects with hardware-oriented parts of hacker culture and revels in the creation of new devices as well as tinkering with existing ones. The maker culture in general supports open-source hardware. Typical interests enjoyed by the maker culture include engineering-oriented pursuits such as electronics, robotics, 3-D printing, and the use of computer numeric control tools, as well as more traditional activities such as metalworking, woodworking, and, mainly, its predecessor, traditional arts and crafts.

The subculture stresses a cut-and-paste approach to standardized hobbyist technologies, and encourages cookbook re-use of designs published on websites and maker-oriented publications.^[1][2] There is a strong focus on using and learning practical skills and applying them to reference designs.^[3] There is also growing work on equity and the maker culture.

Philosophical emphasis

The maker movement is a social movement with an artisan spirit. Promoting equity in the maker movement is fundamental to its success in democratizing access to STEAM and other tech-rich and art domains.

Maker culture emphasizes learning-through-doing (active learning) in a social environment. Maker culture emphasizes informal, networked, peer-led, and shared learning motivated by fun and self-fulfillment.^[4]

Maker culture encourages novel applications of technologies, and the exploration of intersections between traditionally separate domains and ways of working including metal-working, calligraphy, film making, and computer programming.

Community interaction and knowledge sharing are often mediated through networked technologies, with websites and social media tools forming the basis of knowledge repositories and a central channel for information sharing and exchange of ideas, and focused through social meetings in shared spaces such as hackerspaces. Maker culture has attracted the interest of educators concerned about students’ disengagement from STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in formal educational settings.

Maker culture is seen as having the potential to contribute to a more participatory approach and create new pathways into topics that will make them more alive and relevant to learners.

Maker projects can also be about the arts and ELA projects, particularly when incorporating digital design technologies.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture