Resources

A Maker is a modern-day tinkerer and hands-on builder of DIY artifacts. Makers create their inventions wholly out of their imaginations, with the support of a rich collaborative online and in-person community. This paper describes the results from a qualitative study of adult Makers and their characteristics of collaboration in the Maker community. Results indicate that Makers exhibit a mindset of Additive Innovation. This describes the open community of sharing and learning that is the Maker community. Connections between engineering and Making are also discussed.

Making is a recent educational phenomenon that is increasingly occurring in schools and informal learning spaces around the world. In this paper we explore data from maker educators about their experiences with failure. We surveyed maker educators about how they view failure happening with youth in their formal and informal programs and how they respond. The results reveal some concrete strategies that seem to show promise for helping educators increase the likelihood that failure experiences for youth can lead to gains in learning and persistence.

This article presents results from developing and applying an initial analytic frame for observing and explaining literacy practices in making activities. It describes literacy-related themes that emerged when the framework was applied. These themes are discussed within the making process of fabrication, one of a number of goal-directed stages of making. Findings indicate that literacy practices in fabrication are openly shared, networked, and often oriented toward interfacing between physical and digital worlds. Results come from interviews with 14 adult makers. Implications for project-based

In September 2015, with support from the National Science Foundation (DRL-1514726), TERC and the Institute for Learning Innovation launched the Math in the Making project to engage the field in discussions about the relationships between mathematics and making and, in particular, to consider how integrating the two might both enrich making experiences and support mathematical learning and interest development for children and adults. The collaboration included a national workshop with leaders from informal education, mathematics, and making and tinkering; a pre-workshop online discussion; a

Digital literacies for disciplinary learning explores intersections of digital and disciplinary literacies across learning contexts such as community makerspaces and schools and examines learning across disciplines including the arts, engineering, science, social studies, language arts, and math. Columns will address work with both youth and adults, both in school and out of school. Digital enhancements will encourage interactivity with readers and will provoke questions, comments, and connections.

Research on productive failure has examined the dimensions which are most beneficial for students’ learning of well-defined canonical problems in math and science. But failure plays an equally important role in solving open-ended, or ill-defined, design problems that have become prominent in many STEM-oriented maker activities. In understanding the role of failure in openended design tasks, we draw on Kapur’s conceptualization of productive failure and connect it to research on the role of construction in learning. We report on findings from an eight-week long workshop with 16 high school

Attending to issues of equity in making demands that we work closely with communities, focusing on what it is made, how it is made, for whom, and in what contexts. Rather than exploring making exclusively as a pathway to STEM learning, we examine how Indigenous youth learned about and documented community-based making using the Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling (ARIS) platform. Drawing on a range of qualitative data, we asked: (1) What did youth learn about makers, materials, and cultural meanings in their community? (2) What were the making processes of small groups of Native

This is a story about learning STEM content and practices while making objects. It is also a story about how that learning is contextualized in one young man’s disruption of racism simply by trying to learn how gears work. Our project, Investigating STEM Literacies in MakerSpaces (STEMLiMS), focuses on how adults and youth use representations to accomplish tasks in STEM disciplines in formal and informal making spaces (Tucker-Raymond, Gravel, Kohberger, & Browne, 2017). Making is an interdisciplinary endeavor that may involve mechanical and electrical engineering, digital literacies and

Negative attitudes about mathematics and the poor performance of U.S. adults and students on measures of mathematical reasoning are well-documented problems that limit many people’s identities and career aspirations. At the same time, the last decade has seen a proliferation of out-of-school environments that foster making and tinkering activities. Enthusiastic participants in these activities are often engaging in mathematical reasoning without realizing it—and thus do not consider themselves competent mathematical thinkers. Is there a way we can leverage the popularity of making and