Quin Etnyre was eleven years old, having started middle school in a coastal city in central California, when his mom noticed that he was just not enjoying school anymore. He was a bright kid, but he was uninspired by his days at school. She took it upon herself to look for something that might interest him. She found Make: and bought him a copy, and then brought him to Maker Faire, where he wandered around checking out the wild range of exhibits, from zany to practical. At a workshop there, he learned to solder circuit boards.
Quin went back home after the Faire and taught himself to code. Then he moved on to Arduino. He started making things, and the next year he came back to Maker Faire as an exhibitor to show off what he’d been making. He built a website called Qtechknow, filled with how-to tutorials and project guides in addition to a catalog of his products. By the time he was twelve, he was following in the footsteps of Limor Fried and other professional makers.
Quin built a shield for Arduino called ArduSensor, housed in a second circuit board that can fit on top of an Arduino board and can be used to plug in other components. Essentially Quin made a system for easily adding individual sensors to Arduino. One of Quin’s ArduSensors is a fart detector. “There were questions,” Quin said, “so many questions. How bad does it smell? Do I want to run away? We can develop technology to answer these questions.” Who else but a twelve-year-old boy would come up with such a thing?
Quin can be found teaching classes, like Introduction to Arduino, to adults, donning his MIT T-shirt with the idea that he might go there someday. He’s even been on industry panels, the little guy talking about electronics alongside the adult presenters. Quin keeps returning to Maker Faire, where he has won ribbons for various projects and has been a featured speaker. In 2014 he came to Maker Faire Rome, where he tweeted that he got to see the pope and meet the mayor of Rome. When I last checked in with Quin, he had launched a Kickstarter to fund the development and marketing of a new product; he had already raised more than $30,000, and hoped to meet his stretch goal of $50,000. He’s had a wonderful series of adventures as a young maker, but it all started when making sparked his curiosity and opened a new world for him.
One could consider Quin an exceptional child. He does have the good fortune of having parents who are able to provide him with resources and experiences like a visit to Maker Faire or to help him by filling customer orders on the kitchen table. But in terms of intelligence and ability, Quin is just like lots of other kids. He just managed to find his own passion and find a community to support him. There are many more young makers like Quin who have become well-known through Maker Faire, such as Super Awesome Sylvia Todd, Joey Hudy, Schulyer St. Leger, and Audrey Hale.
In 2014, as Quin was preparing to enter high school, the school board extended an invitation for him to come and talk to them about his products, his website, and his visit to the White House Maker Faire. After he was done, Jim Hogeboom, the superintendent, asked him, “Where did you learn to do all those things?” Quin replied, “Outside of school.”
Hogeboom didn’t like that answer. Neither did Quin. There was no opportunity to learn making in school, Quin told the board. He added that he’d like to see the school create a makerspace so that other kids could learn what he learned outside school. Quin suggested that Hogeboom call me, and he did. He wanted to know how to create a makerspace and how to prepare his teachers to help kids learn to make.
Engaging more kids in making has become a passion for me. There are plenty of kids who are never given the opportunity to make, and yet if they were, they might respond just like Quin. It could allow more young people to take control of technology in their lives while also taking control of their own learning.
I identify with kids who are bored and looking for something to do. I was one of them. When I was six, I was diagnosed with a disease of the bone marrow, osteomyelitis, which affected my right leg. I was hospitalized frequently, for weeks at a time. I found myself in a room with beige walls, a black-and-white TV, and a bedpan. Although my parents came to see me, I was alone a lot and immobile. I struggled with boredom. I didn’t want to be bored, and I found out that it was within my control. I could play in my mind. My imagination could take me places my body wished it could go. I could find ways to displace boredom with almost anything. I loved books because they told me about the world, but I didn’t see reading as an end in itself, but a means to an end. I was interested in learning how to do things. Over time, I realized that I was a good learner and I could learn on my own.
My mother was a teacher, and in college I was an English major with a minor in education. Yet I didn’t become a teacher, in part, because what I learned from student teaching was that classroom teachers had little time to help students learn. Instead, the teacher had to be in charge, speaking in a loud voice to get the attention of students and trying all kinds of tricks to maintain control of a group of restless, even agitated, students. To be fair, my student teaching in the mid-1970s in Louisville, Kentucky, took place in schools affected by the desegregation court orders that bused minority students to white suburban schools and suburban kids to inner-city schools. It was motivated by the noblest of intentions, but it was done without creating the necessary support and infrastructure for students, teachers, or the community.
I certainly wasn’t thinking of children or teens when I created Make: magazine. Its intended audience was adults, yet it became apparent early on that kids were already part of it. Maker Faire was getting younger every year, with more and more children coming. Kids were—and are—engaged by what they see and experience at Maker Faire in a way that they pretty much never experience at school.
I began wondering what happens to those kids on Monday, the day after Maker Faire is over. I thought of it as “my Monday problem.” If kids were inspired by the weekend at Maker Faire to become makers themselves, where would that go on Monday? I was reasonably sure that students were not given the opportunity to learn making inside school, unless they were exceptionally lucky. How could I address that? How could I find others who wanted to change that? How could I work with museum and library leaders, afterschool providers, teachers, parents, and the kids themselves? How could I advocate for creating a context that allowed students to play, make, and learn in informal and formal education settings? I believed it would change how children learn, particularly in school, and it just might lead to transforming education so that it focused more on how children learn best.
In some communities, there are opportunities for the kind of playful hands-on learning we see at Maker Faire, in places outside schools or after school, at Children’s Museums or summer camps.
The Exploratorium is a cherished museum of art, science, and human perception in San Francisco, created in 1969 by the visionary Frank Oppenheimer, who believed in direct, experiential interaction with physical phenomena as a path to deep understanding. Oppenheimer believed in tinkering. I have worked with Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich of the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio on many programs to explore tinkering as learning. We developed a series of programs for families on Saturday mornings called Open Make. Each session had a theme, such as making musical instruments or making things from metal. Participants figure things out by trial and error and learn from what others are doing around them.
I remember watching a young boy standing at an old Exploratorium pinball exhibit that allowed him to create and modify his own pinball machine playfield. I was fascinated how he moved a set of wooden pieces of different shapes in place to alter the path of the ball. Each time, after shooting the ball, he reconfigured the blocks, changing them to create new obstacles and new paths. There were no instructions, no guides, and he was fully engaged, each time making it new and more challenging.
As Karen and Mike say in their beautifully illustrated book called The Art of Tinkering: “When you tinker, you’re not following a step-by-step set of directions that leads to a tidy end result. Instead, you’re questioning your assumptions about the way something works, and you’re investigating it on your own terms.”1
In Pittsburgh, the Children’s Museum has created Makeshop in a room that once housed a Mister Rogers exhibit. Mister Rogers was from Pittsburgh, and Makeshop retains a framed sweater that he wore, which apparently his mother made for him. The Makeshop is a very well-designed workshop, distinguished by its simplicity and warmth, a combination of natural wood and stainless steel. The space has college students as guides who help facilitate making experiences with visitors. Jane Werner, the museum’s executive director, told me that typically what she saw in Makeshop was a parent or grandparent who would sit down with a child, and they would start making together. What surprised her was how long they were engaged, sometimes taking a break for lunch and then coming back to pick up where they left off. Museum experiences are often short, but at Makeshop, families were occupied for long periods of time.
One of the student guides in Makeshop, Kevin Goodwin, did his thesis for an early childhood education program on tape as a material for children. “Tape as in the masking, scotch, duct tape; the stuff you use to connect, seal, decorate, bind, measure, hang, attach, etc.,” he writes. “What are the skills involved in using tape, and what are the necessary motor skills that need to be developed before a child can properly use tape?” Kevin spent one month in Makeshop watching toddlers trying to use tape. Cutting tape with scissors and tearing tape are both difficult for toddlers to do, requiring dexterity, good hand-eye coordination, and fine-motor skills.
A question about making and tinkering is often raised: Yes, children enjoyed it, but what did they learn? We have a false dichotomy between learning and play, when in fact the two go hand in hand. “We may think we are helping to prepare our kids for the future when we organize all their time, when we ferry them from one adult-organized activity to another,” writes Stuart Brown in his book Play. “We may be depriving them of access to an inner motivation for an activity that will later blossom into a motive force for life.”2
Finland is often cited as having the best public education system in the world, and Finnish fifteen-year-olds rank at the top of international test scores. One of the reasons is the emphasis on play, which can be freeform as well as guided. “Finland requires its kindergarten teachers to offer playful learning opportunities—including both kinds of play—to every kindergartner on a regular basis,”3 wrote Tim Walker in a story in The Atlantic, wonderfully titled “The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland.” Walker is an American teacher who has taught in Finland and was struck that American and Finnish kindergartens were moving in opposite directions, one decreasing play while the other looking for ways to increase it. According to former Tufts professor David Elkind, American children have eight fewer hours of unstructured playtime after school each week than they did twenty-five years ago, on average.4
Making can give kids the “permission to play,” a phrase we put on T-shirts for Maker Faire. Divine Bradley, founder of the Future Project in Newark, New Jersey, talks about transforming schools by changing the culture: “We made a culture where young people felt like they didn’t need permission to be great, to do great things. It’s not a young people problem, it’s usually an adult problem.” I hope parents understand that they are in a position to give or withhold that permission. Adults should give themselves the same permission, so that entire families join in making activities and projects.
Curt Gabrielson, author of Tinkering: Kids Learn by Making Stuff, sees tinkering as authentic and personal learning. He is asked the “what did they learn” question quite a lot by parents and school administrators. “Heck yes, they are learning something,” writes Gabrielson in his book. “And it may be the most valuable thing they’ve learned all week … this hit-and-miss, trial-and-success, seat-of-the-pants approach.”5 He believes that “tinkering may raise all sorts of questions in their minds that inspire them to learn more about what they’re tinkering with, and it may start them on a path to a satisfying career, not to mention good fun on their own time.”6
Curt himself is a practitioner and helped create the Environmental Science Workshop in Watsonville, California. The leaders in informal learning often call themselves “practitioners,” not teachers. It reflects a different view of the adult’s role not as a subject-matter expert but as someone guiding children through a learning practice. Practitioners trust their own experiences in establishing programs that work for any child, regardless of age, gender, or socioeconomic background. They trust the successful experiences of children that they witness with their own eyes. Practitioners know what is working and what is not. Perhaps we should trust them more, because they are so focused on the children.
In fact, until recently there has been limited research into the educational value of making, in part because if you define educational value as performance on tests, you find yourself trying to provide further justification for the current educational system. There aren’t good ways to measure engagement, for instance. I am sometimes surprised by what educational researchers actually measure.
At an educational conference intended to provide a context for making and learning in education, I recall that members of the audience kept saying: we get what making is, but can you measure its impact on a child’s education? I got rather frustrated and said: “Of all the things you think you can measure, tell me what is really working well in education, because I don’t see it. Is what you’re measuring making the child’s experience in education better?”
Recently, there has been some research that does support the role of making in learning. Lisa Brahms and Peter Wardrip, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh who have studied the learning and making at Makeshop, write about making as a set of learning practices, which they define as “more or less coordinated, patterned, and meaningful interactions of people at work.”7 They identified a set of distinct learning practices that they see:
1. Inquire—an openness and curiosity to possibilities.
2. Tinker—“purposeful play, risk-taking, testing” and engagement with tools, materials, and processes.
3. Seek and Share Resources—sharing knowledge and expertise with each other.
4. Hack and Repurpose—to reuse components and combine them in new ways.
5. Express Intent—discover one’s own interests and personal identity.
6. Develop Fluency—gaining confidence in one’s ability to learn and do things.
7. Simplify and Complexify—gaining an understanding of new ways to create things that have meaning.8
Our formal education system should adopt the practices of informal learning and bring them from outside school to inside school.
Traditional instruction in school—formal education—is based on a model of content delivery that involves a teacher lecturing and a student reading a textbook. The imperative to students is: “Study hard so you’ll do well on the test.” Driven by the noble goal of ensuring equity in the educational system, the No Child Left Behind reforms mandated that teachers all teach the same content, and students all take the same standardized test. Many didn’t agree with this direction for education, but the legislation was a political mandate tied to funding. Who could argue against a goal to provide every child access to an equally good education?
The reality is that the federal and state programs were horribly designed, in ways that eliminated the autonomy of both educators and students. School reforms introduced a command-and-control, all-business approach to schools that made education worse for nearly everyone. The regime of accountability and standards failed to improve how children learn in school and how teachers teach. The social agenda did not have a viable educational model behind it, and most of all, it really failed to get educators behind it. The reforms created a climate of blame and distrust in education. Its moral imperative turned out to be an empty promise. It was going nowhere long before the federal Department of Education began easing its foot off the pedal in 2015.
Paul Heckman, an associate dean at the University of California, Davis, School of Education and a progressive educator, once encouraged me by saying the Maker Movement was creating the “counter-narrative,” something that would become necessary when the dominant narrative of standardized testing had lost its power. The idea of getting making into schools at times has seemed an insurmountable task to me. There was little political support and very little money. Making was deemed insignificant, taking place outside of school often by poorly funded organizations and led by heroic individuals who were seldom recognized for their achievements.
At first, I presumed that educators themselves would be as resistant to change as the entrenched bureaucrats were. But I began to see the opposite was true. Most educators got into the profession because they, like me, had a passion for learning. Seeing a growing number of children falling behind, they were open and receptive to change. They recognize that students are natural experimenters who want to know how things work and why things are the way they are. As teachers, they faced the very real problem that their kids were bored, not engaged—and that meant they weren’t learning.
There are some teachers who tell me they do project-based learning (PBL) that involves hands-on activities. Project-based learning can be aligned with making, but there’s an important difference. If students are doing a hands-on activity at the direction of a teacher, often to support a curricular goal, it is not a maker project. If the things students make have no personal value to them, even though it is physical, it is not a maker project. If all the kids are making the same thing at the same time in the same way, that’s just unfortunate. Making can be so much more than that.
A whole lot of teachers started coming to Maker Faire, looking for inspiration as well as for new projects they could bring back to their classes. In 2013, we gave away Maker Faire tickets free to educators if they filled out a survey that asked them why they wanted to come.
Nancy Gittleman, a preschool and elementary visual art teacher in San Francisco, said:
What I love about Maker Faire is that it’s everything important: creativity, science, art, electronics, math, engineering, all together. It makes sense: everything’s connected. In my classes, I use the maker attitude: ignite creativity and imagination and connect projects to the world through inquiry. I teach art, but more than that, I assist the students to explore materials and to invent. My best projects are ones the students devise and expand on.
A high school teacher from Gilroy, California, shared:
I really enjoyed Maker Faire because I got to see a lot of innovation and ideas that I could bring back to my classroom. It also helped me to start to look at developing ideas to make the curriculum more accessible for my students through shrinkable cell models, career opportunities, and adapters that could make cell phones into microscopes.
A school psychologist told us:
Because of their emotional problems, and often learning problems, many of my students have faced years of academic failure. Making things helps them to feel competent, productive, and sometimes to express emotions. They can often feel part of a community of makers and can share what they have made with family. Making is a very valuable tool to help these adolescents feel better about themselves.
A special-ed teacher wrote: “My students struggle with all learning. We made little wooden birdhouses. They had to figure the perimeter of the birdhouse, measure each side, make templates to cut out their paper, and cut the template using as little paper as possible. They never got that it was math!”
Debbie, an elementary school teacher in Cupertino, California, wrote:
Students in my classes are very strong academically. They show their deeper understanding through hands-on projects, not just through traditional means such as testing and experiments. Projects also give students practice working in collaborative ways toward a common goal. Making allows students to use their knowledge and skills to bring concepts to life.
I was not alone in thinking that more children should be able to have in-depth, hands-on learning experiences in school. The Maker Movement was starting to transform education from the bottom up, unlike top-down federal and state educational reforms. It was largely due to the efforts of teacher champions.
As more parents, teachers, principals, schools, and school districts recognize the role for making in education, we have seen a renaissance in exploring alternative ideas about learning that come not so much from current research but from old sources. The word renaissance literally means “rebirth,” but it’s more like a rediscovery. The Italian Renaissance was a rediscovery of Greek and Roman knowledge and wisdom that led to a flourishing of new ideas. Today we’re reengaging with the prominent educational philosophies of the first half of the twentieth century. Maria Montessori and John Dewey published their philosophies of education around 1920, while the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget wrote about his findings in children’s development in the 1950s and 1960s, and Seymour Papert explored the positive ways that technology could help children learn in the 1970s.
Born in Italy in 1870, Montessori developed methods of teaching and creating environments conducive to learning that at the time were considered revolutionary. Montessori used object-based exercises to develop an “education of the senses.” Her exercises encouraged children to explore the sense of touch with their eyes closed. She set out metal containers of water heated at six degree intervals; blocks made of three different woods that differ in weight by six grams; and other blocks with alternating strips of smooth paper and sandpaper. Children were asked to recognize the differences and respond by placing the objects in some order.
Montessori believed that this education of the senses was important for the child’s ongoing development as a learner. She wrote:
To teach a child whose senses have been educated is quite a different thing from teaching one who has not had this help. Any object presented, any idea given, any invitation to observe, is greeted with interest, because the child is already sensitive to such tiny differences as those which occur between the forms of leaves, the colors of flowers, or the bodies of insects. Everything depends on being able to see and on taking an interest. It matters much more to have a prepared mind than to have a good teacher.9
Another hallmark of the Montessori method is to structure the environment and teaching so that children become independent, self-directed learners. She noticed that practical activities such as caring for the self or caring for surroundings, like washing, cooking, exercise, or gardening—hands-on activities that have a clear purpose—had an attraction for children and gave them a sense of accomplishment. Her methods emphasized choice, challenge, curiosity, and collaboration. She believed that children learn better when they can choose what to do and when. This philosophy of education later became known as “constructivist,” meaning that a child must construct the world to understand it. Learning is active, not passive: we don’t receive knowledge, we must construct it, as with building blocks.
John Dewey established “learn by doing” as an educational philosophy over a hundred years ago. He knew that we learn from real experiences, by interacting with the world and observing the results of our actions. Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education:
To “learn from experience” is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction—discovery of the connection of things.10
We might call it “experimental play” as well as “experiential learning.” Dewey emphasized the primacy of experience over the accumulation of knowledge. “I believe that education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living,”11 he wrote. Dewey believed that kids were motivated to learn when they had some choice about what to study and some responsibility for deciding how. They were motivated when they worked on tasks that made sense to them, especially tasks that really needed to be done, and when they worked in the context of a shared endeavor. He believed that curriculum should be organized around real-life problems and questions and should involve important, current social themes. Dewey understood that education should prepare people for an unpredictable future with new challenges. He saw the need for us to become lifelong learners, experimenters, and problem-solvers, which is what distinguishes makers.
Learning by doing means we are getting hands-on, in a literal and figurative sense. I think sometimes we take “hands-on” too literally, as if “minds-on” were something different. The seal of MIT depicts a craftsman at an anvil and an intellectual in robes with the motto in Latin Mens et Manus, which means “mind and hand.” As with that motto, “hands-on” should imply a personal way of understanding something through one’s actions. The opposite of “hands-on” is “hands-off,” which not only means not wanting to touch something, but also not wanting to engage with it or understand it.
The Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget titled his book on education To Understand Is to Invent. It’s a beautiful and unusual expression of a truth that learning is a creative act, a discovery of something new to the learner. He believed that an experimental process is at the heart of education, that children have to try things themselves to learn: “An experiment not carried out by the individual himself with all freedom of initiative is by definition not an experiment but mere drill without educational value.”12
The practical challenge in applying Piaget’s theory has been that it is inefficient. Engaging children in real-world experiments takes time, as they go through all the roundabout paths that are inherent in real learning. There are no shortcuts. While it may be more efficient to give them worksheets with questions that we know can be answered, we should not optimize for efficiency in education. It’s not a very satisfying or rich learning experience. Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote that authentic learning is “deep immersion in a consequential activity.”13 That is a great phrase to describe making. Immersion is not a quick dip, not a ten-minute exercise. How could schools be organized to offer more of these immersive experiences? The answer would be to focus less on subjects and more on the experience of learning. In other words, focusing less on teaching might open time for deeper learning.
Paul Heckman, along with his colleagues Robert Halpern and Reed Larsen, wrote a paper called “Realizing the Potential of Learning in Middle Adolescence.” It highlights that students of this age learn best:
• when they focus in depth on a few things at a time
• when they see a clear purpose in learning activities
• when they have an active role: co-constructing, interpreting, applying, making sense of, and making connections
• when it is a shared activity within meaningful relationships
• when it allows for increasingly responsible participation within a tradition, a community, and a culture14
I might add to the list:
• when the work has personal value beyond school, whether aesthetic, practical, or civic.
In experiential learning, the teacher’s role changes yet it is not less important. According to Piaget: “What is desired is that the teacher cease being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions; his role should be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.”15 Maker educators see themselves as facilitators, guiding but not taking control of the child’s experience. “Facilitator” may sound like a neutral observer, a somewhat passive role, yet that is hardly the case. Instead of delivering content, the teacher has more time to interact directly with children, offering encouragement and support for their learning.
I like to use the analogy of coaching. First off, athletes (or the debate team, or chess club members) are doing something they love doing, so part of a coach’s job is to build on that love and not crush it through harsh criticism, excessive competition, or humiliation. A coach organizes practice to improve how the players play individually and as a team. Practice is necessary for self-improvement and teamwork. The coach’s role is pivotal in understanding the motivations of the players, keeping them motivated to stay focused in practice and to play to the best of their ability or beyond. Students who are listless and bored are not playing well. Students who are following orders and have no sense of agency or control will not play at the highest level.
The coach’s role is not to play the game. A coach should be an astute observer of the players and give them feedback on their performance. An educator can be exactly this kind of valuable source of supportive feedback, helping students recognize their own challenges, encouraging them to persist and fight through frustration and self-doubt, and celebrating their accomplishments. The sign of a good coach is that the students need less and less coaching because they have internalized how best to practice and play.
In the 1980s, a professor of applied mathematics at MIT named Seymour Papert developed his own learning theories. Papert, who saw computer technology as a tool for children to begin teaching themselves, developed the idea of “constructionism.” He argued that children will construct new knowledge the best when they are, in fact, constructing something real. Mitch Resnick and Jay Silver are continuing Papert’s work at MIT, as described in chapter 7.
While they have been mostly ignored by mainstream education, the philosophies of Montessori, Dewey, Piaget, and Papert have flourished in informal learning settings like the Exploratorium and programs such as Reggio Emilia in Italy. It’s analogous to Europe in the Dark Ages, when monasteries copied the books that preserved classical knowledge and held on to it until our culture was ready to rediscover it. Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager wrote a book for educators titled Invent to Learn. It provides more detail on educational research and practice. Their central thesis is that “children should engage in making because it is a powerful way to learn.”16
Most makerspaces were organized for adults, not children. I began to advocate, along with many others, that we create makerspaces for children in schools and libraries. Makerspaces could be understood as a new kind of library designed to serve the whole school and all subjects, not just one. In fact, school librarians are among those leading the way in organizing school makerspaces. A makerspace can organize the functions of an art studio, a shop class, a computer lab, and more.
I felt that a makerspace was a way to change the student’s experience of school by creating a new place where learning could look and feel different. A makerspace is a workshop; it’s not a place where you go to sit down. It’s a place where you stand and move around to do your work. You might work at large workbenches with other people. You choose which tools to use and move to workstations for specific tasks. You see lots of creative work from other people.
My own particular interest was how makerspaces could attract students who were not performing well academically, and provide them with another path. I was less worried about the top third of students, and more interested in the others, the two-thirds who aren’t doing well academically in school. I wanted those kids to have a chance to succeed as learners—and define what success means to them.
I decided that if I was going around the country talking about makerspaces in schools, first I should do something in my own backyard, in Sebastopol, California. I approached the local superintendent, Keller McDonald, and asked him if I could support a maker class at the high school. As our Make: office was then within walking distance of the school, I offered to host it in our office, where we had some equipment and junior college students as interns. McDonald listened and said something that more people, not just educators, should say: “yes.” He thought it was a good idea to try doing the class outside school. I also asked him if we could do something to get around block-scheduling, because kids needed more than fifty minutes. McDonald thought it could be done.
Several weeks later, McDonald called to say that he found a good teacher to lead the class. His name was Casey Shea, a math teacher who did woodworking at home in his garage. It’s important to remember that for teachers as well as students, skills developed outside school can be brought into school. Another teacher, Dante De Paolo, taught biology and was a motorcycle fabricator on nights and weekends. He was excited to connect what he did outside school with what he did inside.
Casey would not be the last math teacher I’d meet who wanted to get involved in making. Many math teachers work with students who struggle in their subject, which often feels abstract and arbitrary. Casey became the champion for the maker class, and he did everything possible to pull it off, having to build it without much of an advance plan. The administration figured out how the class could run for seventy-five minutes. We agreed that the goal of the class was to build confident learners through the practices of making. Because the class was an elective, Casey had to recruit students. He set up tables at lunchtime and showed off projects. Many of the kids didn’t know what making was. Yet thirty students signed up: mostly sophomores, and a few juniors and seniors.
Some were top students, but most were in the middle, and some were doing poorly. A senior who was an A student told me that the making class was the first time she got to do anything creative in school. Another rather quiet young man, whom I learned was struggling in school and living with his grandmother, chose to work on repairing and modifying a motorized scooter. Over time, he got better at explaining what he was doing. One day, Sanjay Gupta visited the class to do a segment for his program on CNN, and I was delighted to see this young man doing an interview on national TV and confidently explaining his project, even under the pressure of having a camera pointed at him.
Other teachers came to visit, many from outside the area. We also gave tours to administrators. These visitors witnessed students working without direction, their work indistinguishable from play. The room had a nice sound, like the buzzing of bees in the hive, as the students talked intently, sharing their work and watching what others were doing. If you asked them what they were doing, they would tell you about the specific problem at that moment.
I expected from administrators a series of skeptical questions about how making supported learning, and I anticipated arguments that it didn’t align with standards. Yet when the administrators walked around the makerspace, they got it immediately. I remember one of them saying: “I have kids who need this.” They saw how students benefit from a makerspace. For some of them, they could see that it would keep their kids in school—kids who were bored in school and kids who didn’t respond well to academic programs. The administrators’ questions were about how, not why.
In the second year of the program, the old shop class at the high school became available. It was a rough space with good light. What leftover shop equipment was there had been pushed into the back of the room. A portion of the room had been turned into a conventional schoolroom for an agriculture class. There were several stacks of solid blue ag textbooks on a shelf and a white board, a fitting symbol of uninspired instruction.
Saul Griffith, a master maker with an MIT PhD, and I applied for and won a DARPA grant to develop a playbook on Makerspaces and work with a network of schools to develop makerspaces as a pilot program. (Some people in the maker community were upset at me for taking grant funding from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.) I saw the goal as extending the Maker Movement into schools, moving what we saw happening outside in the communities into education. The role of the playbook was to make it easier for educators to understand what a makerspace can be and how to organize it. Educators don’t need a large budget upfront to do so; they can start small and grow a makerspace organically. It could be built in a modular way, organizing areas for electronics and textiles, for instance, and sourcing tools and materials from the community. From my experience visiting lots of school labs and makerspaces, I felt that the biggest challenges for schools were getting the right people involved and creating a sense of community around the space. It was a question of fostering a creative, collaborative culture where students feel inspired to make and where caring and knowledgeable mentors provide support.
I realized in working with our teachers in the program that there were three distinct kinds of projects and interactions: directed projects, guided projects, and open projects. In any program of making, you’ll find each type, but I think a program should be designed so that open making accounts for fifty percent of the work, while guided projects should be thirty percent and directed projects no more than twenty percent.
Directed projects should really be limited to teaching a specific skill or conducting safety training. Somewhat like traditional classroom education, the teacher speaks and the students listen; the teacher leads and the students follow. If you want to learn to use a drill press, you need someone to show you how to do it, and then you take your turn.
Guided projects are when a student follows an existing project, probably relying on a set of instructions. If you haven’t built a potato cannon or a soda-bottle rocket, you should do so: there are lots of project instructions online. Neither of these are original ideas for projects, yet you can learn a lot by doing these projects. Interpreting instructions and working methodically to complete a project is harder than it looks.
The third type is “open projects,” which is perhaps nirvana for makers who want to work on a project of their own. An open project is open-ended from start to finish. The student or team of students generate an idea for the project, and then figure out how to make it, doing research and learning new skills along the way. It might be prompted by a theme or challenge. An open project really is a product of students’ creative design and technical skill sets. Some might see a problem in open projects in that children have brilliant ideas that they lack the skills to make real, but it’s a good problem to let imagination get way ahead of reality. Projects may have constraints based on resources, tools, skills, or funding. So students won’t be able to build everything, but they can imagine everything. Often we’ll see that imaginative ideas can lead to prototypes built using cardboard and tape construction. What they are able to build might barely resemble the idea, but it captures their intention beautifully so that it can be shared with others.
In my own town of Sebastopol we started at the high-school level. What has surprised me is how much interest there is for makerspaces at the elementary-school level. Melissa Becker, the principal of Meadow Elementary School in Petaluma, California, started a maker lab for her students. She had space but no money to buy materials. She sent a letter home to parents asking them to collect anything around the house that kids could use as materials for making, emphasizing the value of recycled things. She told them to put the materials in a zip-lock bag and send them to school with their children. Many did, and she got materials like used tubing, corks, scrap wood, PVC pipes, and more. She wrote to me, “I was in awe after my first half hour with each class: students were all engaged in building cool things and exploring how things work. Now I go in once a month for thirty minutes with each class, and we have a ball.” She asked parents to volunteer as docents, and sixteen people responded, the best response she ever had. If you don’t ask …
Parents and the community at large can play an important role as stakeholders in school makerspaces. Successful schools like Becker’s reach out and engage them. They also send their kids out into the community to show off the things they made. Becker’s students, for instance, made holiday ornaments and sold them to parents to raise funds for their maker lab.
Months later, Becker wrote me to say, “We want to move our lab forward and try some more maker-type activities that will involve circuits, soldering, and building.” Becker applied and won a $13,000 grant from a local education foundation. Her efforts inspired other schools to get started as well.
Not every school can access the same grants, parental support, or community resources. In Cleveland, the Design Lab Early College high school serves 220 at-risk youth. I got a tour from Eric Juli, the school principal, and Sean Wheeler, an enthusiastic maker educator who has been developing maker programs for several years in schools in the Cleveland area. Both are truly committed to maker education and bringing it to the lives of the students who perhaps need it the most. The facility itself, built in the 1960s, was designed like a panopticon prison, so that a second-floor central office could oversee all the classrooms and activity. In an inspired move, Juli and Wheeler decided that this central office would become school’s makerspace. The school doesn’t have much of a budget for the makerspace, so they are doing everything on the cheap. They were still setting up the space while I was there, but they had basic woodworking equipment and a single 3-D printer.
Wheeler learned that a local company was throwing away a lot of wooden pallets, and Juli decided they’d stack them in the cafeteria, right in the middle of school. Students used the pallets to build an outdoor stage for the local Ingenuity Festival, a project that required them to learn woodworking but also design and collaboration skills.
I met Zuri, a student who had spent so much time in the principal’s office over the last year that he recognized that Juli needed a gate at the entrance to his office. Working with wood from the pallets, Zuri was building the gate. By all accounts, Zuri faces many challenges growing up as a young black man. He has never done well in school, and just getting him to show up regularly is a win. Zuri speaks reluctantly, cautiously, keeping his focus on his work. Wheeler took Zuri to a local woodworking shop called Soulcraft for a Saturday workshop, where he started working on a bedside table for his room. Zuri remarked how working with wood that wasn’t from a pallet was much easier and more satisfying. Zuri’s woodworking allows other students and the staff to see him as someone who can be successful. Another student, Carrionn, came in showing us a cup he had 3-D printed, bubbling with pride. He only learned about 3-D printing and already was bragging about what he could do.
“I want kids doing real world work that matters,” said Juli. “I see making as a vehicle to develop the mindset and skills for first-generation high school students to succeed.” He explained that finishing high school really is life or death for these kids because there is really no livelihood for those who don’t finish school. “I am betting that making gives kids ownership over their lives. They can become members of a community that is building, caring, contributing.”
While many private schools, with access to funding, have embraced making after deciding that it is good for their students, we need to support the same thing happening in schools of the inner city and in rural communities.
The promise of putting makerspaces in schools is that educators and the community can come together to change how children learn in school. It can happen when educational leaders are willing to reevaluate how physical space, the structure of the school day, the peer relationships of children, and technology can be leveraged to change the learning experience of all children. It can transform the culture of the school so that it supports creative work and the development of talent. It’s a learning environment aligned with how children learn, seeing them as naturally curious and naturally good learners. We can transform our community as well by cultivating a creative maker mindset and becoming a learning community for all people, young and old.
The future of education is community-based, not campus-based. The number of options for learning outside of formal school is growing at an exponential rate, and we might think of them as many educational services with many different providers. What if all those services found in informal learning had the same degree of visibility as formal learning? For that matter, what if we unbundled the services found in formal education and made them visible as well?
Perhaps the best way to change our whole system of education is to organize all the resources in and outside the system so that more people can use them. The future of education will depend on leveraging many more alternative sources of learning so we can help more people discover and use them more effectively. Just as we are exploring alternative sources of energy, we ought to be exploring how to organize alternative sources of learning. Sadly, our kids have been hardwired to large school systems: the coal-burning power plants of education. So I’ve come up with an idea: the Smart Grid for Education. To allow more people to generate and use alternative sources of energy, we have to replace a system that hardwires homes to the local power plant. The grid allows various new sources power to be distributed to anyone who is on the grid.
We should want students to have more choices based on their interests, and we also need it done in a more equitable way. Students who live in affluent communities find a rich set of learning choices and have a huge advantage over those with the fewest choices. Think about finding a piano teacher or an after-school robotics program. The so-called achievement gap is intensified by a lack of access to resources for personal development that are found in affluent and middle-class communities but not in poor neighborhoods.
The Smart Grid is basically a network of existing services or resources. As I talk about it here, it’s just a concept; there’s not even a prototype. It’s a way of thinking how the Internet might be used to do what it does so well: create self-organizing, distributed social networks. Education needs to be as open as the Internet, as open as the Web, as open as open source. Instead of a cafeteria’s set menu, it could be more like Yelp: to be used, monitored, evaluated, and reviewed. It should be as easy to find learning resources as it is to find a pizza place or a beauty salon.
If we had a Smart Grid for Education, we could see more educational offerings in a community or across communities. This would raise the visibility and value of informal learning, whether provided by individuals or institutions: classes, DIY workshops, lectures, projects, activities, community service, work-study, and other learning opportunities. Science museums, 4-H groups, music teachers, FIRST Robotics, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts could connect their current offerings into the grid. Even work-study programs, apprenticeships, and community service programs could be connected. Connecting a student to the grid could help them tap into resources that they or their parents didn’t know existed.
A Smart Grid for Education could help students and educators find out perhaps not only what resources are in their community but also what is missing. We could use a map view to show where resources are concentrated and other areas where they are lacking, where student needs are not being met by informal or formal educational services. It would help identify opportunities to deliver new services in different areas.
The Smart Grid for Education could create a dynamic metering of a local learning community where activity becomes more visible as it is shared via Twitter and Facebook. The more visible it becomes, the more it will drive participation. How many hours do people living in Seattle spend on learning? How does that compare to Austin or Atlanta? The Smart Grid for Education would support a means of monitoring and visualizing the demand for educational resources by the community and their actual usage. It would help us create a more robust educational ecosystem in our cities and towns.
As I’ve said, many stakeholders in education have asked about the research that shows what students learn when they are making, or how we might assess what students are learning. The questions bothered me, or perhaps the fact that I didn’t have an answer to satisfy them bothered me. I knew that it wasn’t about improving test scores. Then one day, in the shower, I came up with something that has become a mantra for me: Making creates evidence of learning.
Making is its own form of assessment for authentic learning. The products of making demonstrate what a person can do, and what they know. The process itself and the steps along the way can be observed, reported on, reflected upon, and documented in various ways and in various formats. It’s show-and-tell, an ages-old form of demonstration. All of this is evidence of a person’s creative contribution and their technical capabilities. In other words, what makers do and share becomes valuable evidence, which can be reviewed by peers, mentors, or independent experts.
A maker portfolio is a collection of projects, highlighting show-and-tell as well as providing links to notes, media, and documentation. This portfolio should live online and become something that anyone can discover to learn about who you are, what you are most passionate about, and what you’ve learned to do. Already students are creating this evidence online and sharing URLs that link to their work on Instructables, YouTube, and social media. These individual portfolio items are not yet well-organized; however, they are accessible online.
Before the Internet, the sharing of demonstrations, performances, and exhibitions was nearly impossible because you had to be there to see it. They were considered ephemeral. Today student presentations can easily and cheaply be captured and made available on the Internet. Now we can do better than using tests and grades to evaluate a student’s ability and talent: we can present authentic evidence by sharing a URL.
Grades and test scores are a poor proxy for the talents of young people. We can develop better tools than transcripts. There are a number of existing portfolio software systems and websites, but often they are licensed to a school that thinks of the portfolios as their property. That’s why we need an open-source approach to portfolios that gives students complete access and control to what is in their portfolio.
An open portfolio would organize all the student’s projects, performances, and demonstrations that reflect authentic learning experiences, whether they occurred in formal or informal settings. The open portfolio is an alternative educational record for a student, much as a transcript serves as a record of a student’s participation in a formal education system. But with the record open, there’s never a need to pay for access or copies. (I’ve never understood why schools assume they own students’ records, just like hospitals and doctors once assumed they own patient records.) The open portfolio is also valuable for the students to see their own learning progression and perhaps share with others, including their peers who might wish to follow a similar path. In its simplest form, the open portfolio manages links to online resources (photos, videos, blogs) online that reflect the student’s accomplishments.
There’s an important role for educators in any open portfolio system. Educators can authenticate participation and provide an independent assessment of student work. There could be awards and recognition of students based on the quality of the work in the portfolio, and as importantly, the progression that they show in the development of that work over several years. What if, instead of listing classes, a school’s website was a collection of student portfolios showing the work of everyone in the school?
When it’s time to apply for college, what if portfolios were accepted as part of the admissions process? Some colleges already do. If a student applies to an art or design school, they will be asked to present a portfolio of their work, most likely a physical portfolio. It’s interesting that while a design school might look at grades as a basic sign of competency, it has a process to review the portfolios of prospective students to evaluate their talents and whether there is a good fit with their program. That doesn’t happen in science and engineering schools, unfortunately. Grades and test scores are all that matters, and that’s increasingly a problem. A uniform selection criteria ensures a lack of diversity by using a narrow view of prospective students. It might also contribute to the high dropout rates by first- and second-year students in engineering programs.
What I’ve learned from talking to engineering school professors and deans is that they want a more diverse student body, not just in the terms of gender and race but also in terms of talents. However, because of the admissions criteria, a more creative student is more likely to choose a less structured design program over a rigid engineering program. Another issue affecting the dropout rate is that some students are directed into engineering programs because of their math scores. Yet when they get in the program, they realize that engineering as a subject and its course-load don’t appeal to them. A student with a maker mindset might get into engineering school and then realize that the classes are all lectures and no lab. Their love of making things and lack of support for doing that in school can make them change majors as well.
MIT, as one might expect, is actually leading the way among technical universities, announcing in 2013 that maker portfolios could be submitted as part of the admissions process. Students would still be required to submit grades and test scores, but now they could actually show their own work and have it evaluated. Dawn Wendell, then assistant director of admissions at MIT, made an announcement at World Maker Faire, saying: “As we see students getting more involved in the Maker Movement, we wanted to give them a more formalized opportunity to tell us about that part of their life and why it’s important to them.” Wendell said that MIT wants to attract students that are “already solving problems and building, playing, and creating, engaging in projects that they love doing.” She added that “not all successful students at MIT are makers, but MIT is a welcoming place for makers, or students who want to become makers.”
In my talks with the admissions office and with professors, I learned that MIT initiated the portfolio process because they wanted to add ways to find students who were interested in building things. One mechanical engineering professor said to me that he teaches a machine design class, and the fact that so many students have little or no experience with machines is a problem. He wants more students who have some working knowledge of machines, the way that the kids coming from farms once did.
Several years in, MIT is getting over a thousand maker portfolios submitted each year. Disappointingly, fewer young women and minorities are submitting portfolios than young men. This reflects the predominantly white male demographics of the Maker Movement today, but I hope that can be changed as making spreads throughout communities and schools.
The student’s open portfolio has value outside education as well. In the workplace, people list credentials and titles on résumés, but they are not necessarily a reliable indication of what a person can actually do. What we’ve seen in the technology field is that a person’s work is often visible online: they’ve designed web pages or apps, written a blog, taken great photos, created videos, contributed meaningfully in discussion groups, or developed code in open-source projects. People looking for talent come upon this work and follow the connection back to its creator. A business that needs a certain kind of programmer might examine GitHub to find an expert. Chris Anderson of 3D Robotics found Jordi Muñoz to be an expert on building drones because he was so active on Anderson’s site, DIY Drones. One might look on Thingiverse to identify the people with really good 3-D design skills. Sharing work openly online can lead to unexpected opportunities.
The Maker Education Initiative, the educational nonprofit that I cofounded, has a working group on open portfolios, and they will be producing a report with their recommendations on how educators and students can use such portfolios, incorporating the best practices of those who are already doing it. It doesn’t matter as much whether there’s a particular system or software to do it. The more important thing to realize is that young makers (as well as the rest of us) should be encouraged to tell the story of what they made, why they made it, and how it works. They should share the work openly. It’s part of cultivating a maker culture.
As I’ve mentioned, some young makers are already figuring out how to share their stories and find support for what they want to do. Audrey Hale was a fifth grader in Biloxi, Mississippi, who was looking for an idea for a science project. Her mom was a subscriber to Make:, and so Audrey went looking through back issues. In volume 24 she found a balloon-cam project that had a rig consisting of a pill container, a CD-ROM, a microcontroller, and a camera, along with three large balloons that would take it airborne. She thought of it as a satellite, and decided it would be perfect as a science project. Excitedly, she went to her mother and told her she needed some money to buy the supplies for her project. Her mother reminded her that they were a military family, and they didn’t have money in the budget to buy her supplies.
Audrey accepted the answer and then went away for a while before coming back to her mother with a new idea. She proposed that she run a Kickstarter to raise the money she needed. She asked for her mother’s help because she was under the age limit on Kickstarter for posting a project. Her mother said yes, but with healthy skepticism, writing to me:
I actually thought it would be a good way for her to learn that sometimes even when you want something really bad and you ask for help, the answer would still be “no” or “not yet.” Turns out that my passionate little scientist ended up teaching me the lesson that sometimes when you find your tribe, your passionate ideas become real.
Audrey’s Kickstarter, which she called the Little Ariel Satellite, was funded with thirty-two backers providing $420 for her science project. She promised her backers a photo book of her project, providing tangible evidence that she did it.
Audrey built her satellite and entered her school science fair, where she won first place. At regionals, she won first place for engineering in grades 4 to 6, and then won the first place special award given by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Audrey and her family were also invited as participants in the National Maker Faire in 2015 in Washington, D.C. She met members of Congress, attended a reception at the White House, and got to meet other young girls and women who were makers, scientists, and technologists, including Megan Smith, the Chief Technology Officer for the U.S.
Albemarle County in Virginia is the home of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and the University of Virginia. Pam Moran is superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools, a large geographical area with twenty-six schools. She is a passionate educator, a person I immediately liked because she’s fun to be around. She cares so much and loves to tell stories about her schools, her teachers, and her students. She still remembers our first conversation in 2010 when I expressed my worry than making would never find its way into schools because of the dominant focus on standardized testing. If I was once pessimistic, seeing what is happening in Albemarle County is grounds for feeling optimistic about change.
In most schools that I know, making was introduced incrementally, sometimes with the acknowledgment of school administration and sometimes not. One teacher from St. Louis told me that his makerspace started as a closet one year, then he got a small room the next year, followed by a bigger room the following year. Now he has a budget of $80,000 and he knows of twenty other school makerspaces in the city. What makes Pam and her district unique is that they haven’t done just one thing to support maker education; they have tried to do everything across the entire school system over a period of years to cultivate a creative maker culture.
“I describe us as a maker district,” she said. Every classroom is a makerspace, a lab, a studio. The high school library is a makerspace. On a tour of elementary and middle schools, I saw kids working in small groups, and the focus was on their work, not the teacher.
Pam told me, “We embarked on this work many years ago, and didn’t know then that we would call it ‘making.’ When the No Child Left Behind law came out, we saw it was going to suck the passion out of the classroom, out of our teachers, and out of our kids. We said we have to do something about that.” She said that the prevalent educational model of the twentieth century, carried over to the twenty-first century, was about subtraction. Schools removed art, field trips, and shortened recess. The worse kids do on standardized tests, the more that’s taken away from them. They are required to spend twice as much time in a subject they fail at, and it means they have no time for electives such as art.
She put together a team to do what she called the “transformational work” of changing the school experience such that “students pursue their interests, to be able to learn through their hands as well as their minds, to wrap their heads around big ideas, and to do all the kinds of things that sustain us for a lifetime. We want to prepare them for lifelong learning.” Pam wanted to make sure they were capturing at-risk kids and getting them to come back to school, stay in school, and do well.
Pam and her team had to look outside education to find what they were looking for. “We could not find schools doing what we wanted,” she said. Her team visited the Tinkering Lab at the Chicago Children’s Museum. They went to World Maker Faire. “I would send them videos from the Bay Area Maker Faire,” she said, hoping that something would grow organically and spread throughout her district, what she called a rhizomatic process, referring to way a rhizome sends out roots and shoots to spread.
The team came up with a maker-infused curriculum that “changes how kids learn and who gets to learn.” She wanted both the kids and the teachers to see making as part and parcel of everything they do at school. They replaced summer school with Maker Camp, taking a different tack for kids who had fallen behind in the school year. They saw kids who struggled in school have success at Maker Camp. Pam visited the kids at camp and saw one group who had visited the local animal shelter on a field trip and came back the next day wanting to make things for the animals. “They were rolling out dough for dog biscuits and cutting them out like cookies,” she told me. “Do you know what shape of biscuits were? Mailmen.”
Pam said, “We don’t think of the maker work as a program; we think of it as a way of learning.” She talks about underserved kids who are often excluded or left out of the opportunities for “rich learning work that’s reserved for some kids but not those kids.” As the schools have added more choice in ways of learning, it has made a difference: having choices motivates children to learn. “We have a dropout rate that’s down to 2.3 percent, and for African Americans, it is even lower.”
I asked her for advice for other schools. “I’ve got it down now,” she said with enthusiasm. Like me, she gives a lot of talks to schools and school administrators:
I call it the YELP model: The Y stands for yes. People come to you with ideas—teachers, kids, principals, parents. You have to be receptive in order to keep people feeling connected to their motivation. Someone came and asked me early on about having a makerspace in their school. I said I think we could do it. The E is engage. Who do we need to bring together? Who can we work with? Who is there in the community? The L is leverage. What resources do we have that we can leverage? If you lack resources, ask parents to donate tools and supplies. The P is prototype. What experiments can we try to get more kids coming back to school because they love school and get excited about learning?
Pam said it didn’t take six months before she and her team knew that something had really changed. She is particularly proud of a student who came to their district from Brooklyn, New York. The kid had gotten into some difficulty and was sent to live with his grandmother. “We were scared that he was not going to graduate because he had basically nothing on his transcript.” One morning, the student wandered into the library and noticed the music construction studio that had been built a couple of years earlier. She said,
This kid is a musician, but nobody knew that about him. He starts working on music in the studio. He’s a rapper. All of a sudden, here’s a kid who is coming to school at 7 a.m. to get access to the studio, and then staying all day until we have to kick him out. We had thought this kid would be a dropout by the winter holidays. But he kept working, doing work online and in class to grab the credits he needed. Now he still had to pass the state’s standardized test, which in Virginia goes by “SOL.”
She laughs, acknowledging that the acronym of the standardized test in Virginia could stand for “shit out of luck.” She continued, “I got a call two weeks before graduation from one of my principals. She had this kid who wanted to talk to me, and he said proudly that he passed his earth science test, a ninth-grade course, which was a requirement for him to graduate. That kid walked at graduation. That’s what choice does.”
In the fall of 2015, before World Maker Faire, I organized an education forum at the New York Hall of Science. As I set out to organize a series of five panels for the forum, I had the insight that something had profoundly changed in education. No longer were there a few of us on the outside talking about how making belonged inside schools; those who worked in education were now doing the talking about making in schools and communities. Carmen Fariña, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, came to welcome everyone. She was happy to see that a third of the audience were teachers from New York City. She said that she believes in the kind of bottom-up approach to change represented by the Maker Movement. She added that her grandson was particularly excited to be going to Maker Faire.
At education conferences, I often begin my talk by asking the educators if they see themselves as makers. If teachers see themselves as makers, so will their students. I ask the question sometimes reluctantly, fearing that no one will raise a hand. However, even in the worst cases, I get more than a few people raising their hands, maybe ten percent. If I ask how many people love to cook or sew or work in the garden or play a musical instrument, more people raise their hands. I remind them of the many different forms of making. If I don’t get everyone, I just tell them to answer the question “Are you a maker?” with “yes,” because it’s just a better answer than “no.” If making is learning, then teaching can be making as well, perhaps one of the most valuable creative acts in society, encouraging children in the development of their own talents. I’d like to imagine that maker educators set a new standard for education: one where kids are excited about learning. In January 2016 I spoke to educators in the remote Humboldt County, California, town of Eureka, and when I asked the question, the entire audience of teachers raised their hands. That’s progress.
The Obama White House has been a big champion of the Maker Movement, holding the first White House Maker Faire in 2014, when President Obama declared: “If you can imagine it, you can do it, no matter what it is. We imagined things and then we did them. That’s in our DNA, that who we are.”
White House staff in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, under the direction of Thomas Kalil, have helped raise the visibility of making within federal agencies and at the state level, organizing workshops to bring educators together. “It doesn’t seem to be challenging for a high school to raise $1 million for a new football field, so it shouldn’t be challenging for a school to raise $20,000 or $30,000 for a makerspace,” Kalil has said. He encouraged me to start an educational nonprofit, the Maker Education Initiative, called Maker Ed, and came up with its one-line mission statement: “Every Child a Maker.”
Kalil and his staff have also helped promote diversity by reaching out to leaders in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). I spoke at an HBCU workshop, where I was impressed by the amount of maker-related programs and spaces that were already in place, as well as the interest among students. The support of the Obama administration has developed recognition for making and makers across the country as well as internationally.
The Agency by Design initiative at Project Zero, a research group at Harvard Graduate School of Education, published a white paper in January 2015 called “Maker-Centered Learning and the Development of Self.” “Maker-centered learning” means that making in school should be centered on the student’s growth and development rather than curricular goals.
The Project Zero researchers emphasize “the power of maker-centered learning to help students develop a sense of personal agency, a sense of self-efficacy, and a sense of community.” They did site visits and interviews with maker educators:
Many of our interviewees talk about how maker experiences help students learn to pursue their own passions and become self-directed learners, proactively seeking out knowledge and resources on their own. They describe how students learn to problem solve, to iterate, to take risks, to see failure as opportunity, and to make the most out of unexpected outcomes.… Perhaps most strikingly, they talk about how students come to see themselves as capable of affecting positive change in their own lives and in their communities.17
The white paper also introduced the term maker empowerment to describe not just cognitive development but also character development. It is very consistent with the maker mindset, perhaps dressed up in more academic language. Maker empowerment “is a kind of disposition that students develop—a way of being in the world—that is characterized by understanding oneself as a person of resourcefulness who can muster the wherewithal to change things through making.” Maker-centered learning can empower students to live productive lives, regardless of their future occupation. “Not all students who are exposed to maker education will go on to become scientists, technology specialists, mathematicians, engineers, or carpenters. But perhaps, through high-quality maker-centered learning experiences, they might all acquire a sense of maker empowerment.”18
What’s good about the report is how it affirms the value of what maker educators and practitioners have been doing. It can be cited by those who need to base their decisions on research, although academic research on learning rarely has been the driver for change in the classroom. Traditional education and even its reforms have followed a “push” model, as defined by John Seely Brown and John Hagel in their book The Power of Pull. Push leads to compliance. When I first heard a group of educators use the word compliance, I was taken aback. Was it compliance that dominated their thinking? If so, then conformity, not creativity, will be its main product.
Maker-centered learning is “pull.” Students decide what they want to do. Making is being pulled into schools by educators because they see it as a very effective way to engage students in learning. They do it freely because of what it means to them and their students. This kind of change is being driven by parents, teachers and administrators—and students—who see themselves empowered to make change throughout the educational ecosystem. Research is not leading the way; nor is theory. Actions and practice are.
Tim Lord, an actor turned educator, is co–executive director of the DreamYard Project, a twenty-year-old community arts center in the Bronx, New York. It was started “by a group of young people who once wrote a play about a place where kids could go to dream.”
When I visited in 2012, they had just started an afterschool program called Dream It Yourself to introduce students to how things are made and how to use maker tools. They had received a grant to set up a small makerspace. What made it special was their emphasis on the arts and personal expression. They looked at the functional side of making, but they provided an artistic context.
“If they wanted to build a lamp, we’d nudge them to make the lamp a sculpture that lights up” said Hillary Kolos, who is now director of digital learning. “Not everybody knows what ‘maker’ is. We try to explain it, but sometimes I describe it as design and technology.” In the diverse population of the Bronx, Hillary and her team try to keep things culturally relevant by combining arts and social justice. They had to try and define what a maker is in terms that were relevant to the community. They had to ask questions about who makes things in their neighborhood and who they know who is a maker. “If we are going to show them a video of someone making something, I want that to be a person that looks like them,” she said. “It can be hard to find those videos.”
The DreamYard Project started by providing arts programs in schools along with afterschool programs for middle school students at their community art center. Now they offer programs around making in schools, and they have their own high school, which also offers maker classes. This is a pattern we are seeing around the country: successful making programs in informal learning settings are increasingly becoming the focus for new, innovative schools. Why? It works well for students, and they are asking for more.
In the community, Tim works with many organizations, including the large school district. He said that collaboration requires “an emphasis on shared values, and we have strong core values—empower, create, and connect.” He attributes their success to a collective impact philosophy that connects the whole community to meeting the needs of young people. “When we look at the outcomes we want for our children,” he said, “we have to believe that none of us has the silver bullet. We all have to be engaged and responsible for what we can do together.” Transforming education is as much about fostering a creative learning culture in our community as it is about changing our school system.