Lecture Reflections

What challenges and opportunities do you see in implementing maker education and digital fabrication tools within STEAM-based learning environments? Consider how these approaches can cater to diverse learning needs and encourage interdisciplinary collaboration.

Considering my experience as a teacher in maker education, I would say that perhaps there is too much trust put on the maker education tools themselves and a lack of deeper thinking on how these tools can support students' learning, but more so on how this effort can be consistent throughout grade levels. The latter largely depends on the placement of robotics as an activity in schooling. In Greece, for example, robotics is an optional extracurricular activity that the children can attend in the evenings or the weekends. Therefore, situational factors such as a student's availability each year to attend those lessons, or the availability of the activity from one year to another, affect a student's trajectory in this subject and the development of their skills. 

In terms of the lack of deeper thinking, I lay out my observations derived from personal experiences. Robotic kits such as Lego Education packages have the "wow" factor, the element of easily creating enthusiasm to children and raising their engagement levels instantly. Basically,when students see a package filled with colorful LEGO pieces, they instantly want to get their hands on it and start creating. Therefore, in comparison to other subjects, at school for example, that are not so exciting by default e.g history, robotics as a subject does not require much effort from the teacher to engage students in the topic. This, of course, gives a great headstart to the lesson and helps with creating a positive climate in the classroom. Also, the fact that children are excited for their learning, really benefits their learning by itself. However, the challenge here in my opinion, is to not rest on the fact that children are engaged, and to provide meaningful contexts for their learning as well as try to guide that excitement towards achieving learning goals and developing skills rather than letting it unfold in ways that are maladaptive to those purposes. For example, students' excitement and eagerness can, especially in younger ages, make them not want to share their package and use it by themselves to create whatever they want at that current time without considering the teacher or the lesson's purpose. Therefore, it's one of the challenges in the implementation of maker education to guide the students' attention and excitement away from the means that is used (the package), and towards the problem-solving situation within a specific project context that they will attempt to solve in collaboration with their classmates. I believe that in order for the students to develop 21st century skills within their involvement in maker education activities, they have to view the robotics kits as the tool to achieving a goal, not the objective of their learning. 

These are significant challenges that educators often fail to overcome, because of different reasons:

Firstly, robotics is often considered as the children's "happy hour". It's a trending topic in education which makes the parents sign up their children to attend robotics classes, but there is a huge misconception as to what it means for them to be there. Children come to classes having in mind that they will play with lego packages and build whatever they want. It is therefore, another nested challenge to properly educate the parents on the STEAM approach in education and how maker education is theoretically grounded to benefit students' learning, connecting those concepts to the lesson's contents. Communicating this to the parents will, in my opinion, result in students being more aware of the contents of the lessons they are attending. Of course the teacher should also communicate this directly to the students as well.

Secondly, This has to be addressed from the teachers' viewpoint as well. It's a common practice, at least from what I've seen happening in Greece, that robotics teachers split the students in teams, give them the Lego packages, provide them with a robotic design and the building instructions, and then sitting on the side, only assisting students when they face technical problems with the robots. This is a counter-productive way of implementing maker education, since it does not create any challenges for the children but is a rather mindless activity in which students scroll through instructions and simply follow them. This is where the deeper thinking from the viewpoint of the teacher needs to be re-considered.

Of course, this is only one side of things. I do have experiences of robotics lessons where effort has been made to engage the students in a topic, present to them a situation that needs solving, and calling for them to create a robotic design and program it within a specific context.

However, all this is at the discretion of the teacher or of different robotics companies that introduce guidelines for teaching robotics. The fact that there is not a unified approach creates huge gaps in the implementation of maker education. Therefore, a significant challenge in my opinion is creating general guidelines and frameworks that are horizontally utilized, in combination with integrating maker education in the normal schooling schedule, so that situational factors as the ones mentioned in the beginning of the reflection, are eliminated.