1 Beginnings
What we’re doing and why; origins of the Maker movement
Makerspaces come in all shapes and sizes, but they all serve as a gathering point for tools, projects, mentors and expertise. A collection of tools does not define a Makerspace. Rather, we define it by what it enables: making.
Learning environments rich with possibilities, Makerspaces serve as gathering points where communities of new and experienced makers connect to work on real and personally meaningful projects, informed by helpful mentors and expertise, using new technologies and traditional tools.
We’re enabling new makers — and makers of makers — everywhere to create spaces, find the tools they need, and create the programs for the spaces. We know that, while digital design and fabrication tools may be within reach of some, the much greater need of providing adequate staffing and expertise often eclipses the costs of equipping a space. Stuff is not enough. So our team is tackling five areas to make establishing a Makerspace easier for you. You can access each of them at makerspace.com as they become available.
Network. Get access to an open and collaborative network of educators and members of the worldwide maker community, all doing this work too. Share insight, ideas, and best practices from one Makerspace to another. Connect on a local level with makers on the ground and community partners who support making.
Project Library. Our flexible, modular projects introduce skills and allow new makers to filter projects based on their own interests, ability, and available equipment. These projects make it easy to get started and get better, and they’re backed up by all a facilitator needs to know to make the project work with a group.
Learning Lab. Maker Media and the greater Maker community have already generated a large body of content to bring new makers up to speed on making. We provide better ways for learners to discover and access relevant content.
Training and Support. How do you run a class in making? Engage students in projects? Create the right learning environment? Mix disciplines? We nurture a vibrant community of practice among Maker-educators with online workshops & hangouts and in-person professional development. These introduce new ideas and projects and provide ongoing feedback and support.
Tools (both hardware and software). Our pre- packaged kits reduce the barrier of creating a space. We’ve designed a basic “Makerspace in a Box” kit with the standard set of tools needed to complete skill-builder projects like simple chairs, soldering, soft circuitry, etc. Advanced kits would add 3D printers and other optional expansion modules.
We describe elements of some of these five areas of our work in this Playbook. We encourage you to get involved with our efforts by visiting us online at makerspace.com.
The Maker Movement
Makerspace grew out of Maker Media, the force behind MAKE magazine and Maker Faire and a leader in the Maker movement. We find that the Makers we meet share many things in common with one another, even when they are working in very different disciplines.
We hope you will see this mindset reflected in your Makerspace. We want everybody who participates in a Makerspace to see themselves as Makers.
What makes a Maker?
Makers believe that if you can imagine it, you can make it. We see ourselves as more than consumers — we are productive; we are creative. Everyone is a Maker, and our world is what we make it.
Makers seek out opportunities to learn to do new things, especially through hands-on, DIY (do-it- yourself) interactions.
Makers surprise and delight those who see their projects, even though the projects can be a bit rough-edged, messy and, at times, over-stimulating. (Think punk rock.)
Makers comprise a community of creative and technical people that help one another do better. They are open, inclusive, encouraging and generous in spirit.
Makers are generally not in it for the money. This isn’t about filing patents or making a profit.
At the same time, we’re not anti-commercial— Makers sometimes start businesses, and we celebrate that…but we don’t make it a focus as it would change the spirit of the movement.
Makers celebrate other Makers — what they make, how they make it and the enthusiasm and passion that drives them.
The Maker movement continues to gain momentum. We can see the growth of maker communities online as well as the development of physical community workspaces, called Makerspaces, and the spread of Maker Faire around the world. The Maker movement is spurred by the introduction of new technologies such as 3D printing and the Arduino microcontroller; new opportunities created by faster prototyping and fabrication tools as well as easier sourcing of parts and direct distribution of physical products online; and the increasing participation of all kinds of people in interconnected communities, defined by interests and skills online as well as local efforts to convene those who share common goals.
Maker Faire
One way the Maker movement convenes like-minded individuals is through Maker Faires, both those organized by Maker Media and the Mini Maker Faires that are organized by local communities, and popping up in school cafeterias, public parks, and empty warehouses around the country and the world.
Maker Faire is (literally) an explosive environment—full of blasts of imagination, invention, and creativity... oh, and some propane too. If you haven’t been to Maker Faire before, words don’t really do it justice. It’s the premier event for grassroots American innovation and a festival/celebration of DIY (do-it-yourself) culture, organized by Make Magazine. Nowadays, over 900 Makers of all ages convene for one fantastic weekend to show off a spectacular array of projects that combine arts, craft, engineering, food, health, music, creative reuse, performance, science, and technology. Rockets to robots, felting to beekeeping, pedal-power to mobile muffin cars, hardcore hardware to silly software — you never know what you’ll see.
Maker Faire creates conversations with Makers. It is a show-and-tell for people of all ages that brings out the “kid” in all of us. Maker Faire is a community-based learning event that inspires everyone to become a maker and connect to people and projects (and passions!) in their local community. Maker Faire provides a venue for Makers to show examples of their work and interact with others about it. Many Makers tell us that they have no other place to show what they do. It is often out of the spotlight of traditional art or science or craft events. DIY is often hidden in our communities, taking place in shops, in garages and on kitchen tables. So the goal of the event is to make visible the projects and ideas that we don’t encounter every day. Makerspace projects are a perfect fit.
At a typical Maker Faire, you’ll find arts & crafts, science & engineering, food & music, fire & water — but what makes our event special is that all these interesting projects and smart, creative people belong together. They actively and openly create a Maker culture. Makers are fascinating, curious people who enjoy learning and who love sharing what they can do.
Maker Faires are about exhibition, not competition. We don’t see Makers pitting themselves against each other. We hope each student using a Makerspace gets useful feedback on what they are working on, and that the feedback is offered in a spirit of generosity and received with similar openness and magnanimity.
Makerspace is our strongest effort to infuse schools with the spirit of the Maker movement, to re-energize education with the creativity, innovation, curiosity, motivation, technical know-how, and playfulness that characterize our maker community.
The Importance of Play
The origin of the Maker movement is found in something quite personal: what we might call experimental play. Makers are enthusiasts who play with technology to learn about it. A new technology presents an invitation to play, and makers regard this kind of play as highly satisfying. Makers give it a try; they take things apart; and they try to do things that even the manufacturer didn’t think of doing. Whether it’s figuring out what you can do with a 3D printer or an autonomous drone aircraft, makers are exploring what they can do and learning as they explore. Out of that process emerges new ideas, which may lead to real- world applications or new business ventures. Making is a source of innovation.
In his book, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination and Invigorates the Soul, Dr. Stuart Brown tells the story about how the Jet Propulsion Laboratory realized that, although it was hiring the best and brightest college graduates, they were the wrong kind of people. Something had changed in the
kind of people who came to work at JPL.
The JPL managers went back to look at their own retiring engineers and … found that in their youth, their older, problem-solving employees had taken apart clocks to see how they worked, or made soapbox derby racers, or built hi-fi stereos, or fixed appliances. The young engineering school graduates who had also done these things, who had played with their hands, were adept at the kinds of problem solving that management sought.
Those who hadn’t, generally were not. From that point on, JPL made questions about applicants’ youthful projects and play a standard part of job interviews. Through research the JPL managers discovered that there is a kind of magic in play.
We must try to bring the youthful magic of play into schools, hard as it may be. Formal education has become such a serious business, defining success with abstract thinking and high-stakes testing, that there’s no time and no context for play. If play is what you do outside school, then that is where the real learning will take place and that’s where innovation and creativity will be found.
Why Making Matters for Learning
Making is innovative and resourceful. Makers build off the ideas of others and choose the best tools for the job.
Makers are intrinsically motivated. They identify their own challenges and solve new problems.
Making provides ample opportunities to deeply understand difficult concepts. Makers seek out STEM
content to improve their projects, and they cross disciplines to achieve their goals, rather than staying within one specialty.
Makers take risks and iterate from “failures” to achieve success. Makers have a growth mindset that leads them to expend the energy to learn. Making fosters character- building traits collectively known as grit, including creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, persistence, social responsibility, and teamwork, among others.
Makers collaborate and give advice and guidance to their peers. Makers are often more interested in open sharing and exhibition, not competition.
Frankly, we don't want everyone to be an engineer, but we do want everyone to be able to think like one when they need to do so. In our work incubating Makerspaces, we are most interested in developing the physical and mental context that allows students to get started and continue to develop new skills that lead to choosing more challenging projects and more interesting opportunities for themselves in the future.
Potential Impact on Education
As leaders in the resurgence of the DIY (do-it-yourself) movement, we are dedicated to sparking the DIY spirit in all those whose lives we touch. So we don’t see any reason why we, as a society, can’t transform education into a system that nurtures individuals to adopt the habits of mind that Makers have and to become the engaged citizens we want our kids to be.
Our biggest challenge—and the biggest opportunity for the Maker movement—is an ambitious one: to transform education. Our hope is that the agents of change will be the students themselves. Increasingly, technology has given them more control over their lives, and even the simplest cell phone can change a person’s sense of agency.
We hope to bring the Maker movement to education in a few specific ways:
Creating the context that develops the Maker mindset, a growth mindset that encourages us to believe that we can learn to do anything.
Building a new body of practice in teaching making—and a corps of practitioners to follow it.
Designing and developing Makerspaces in a variety of community contexts in order to serve a diverse group of learners who may not share the access to the same resources. (This Playbook serves a role here.)
Identifying, developing and sharing a broad framework of projects and kits based on a wide range of tools and materials that connect to student interests in and out of school.
Designing and hosting online social platforms for collaboration among students, teachers, and the community.
Developing programs especially for young people that allow them to take a leading role in creating more Makers.
Creating the community context for the exhibition and curation of student work in relationship with all makers. Making sure that new opportunities are created for more people to participate.
Allowing individuals and groups to build a record of participation in the Maker community, which can be useful for academic and career advancement as well as advance a student’s sense of personal development.
Developing educational contexts that link the practice of making to formal concepts and theory, to support discovery and exploration while introducing new tools for advanced design and new ways of thinking about making. (Practically, this means developing guides for teachers, mentors and other leaders.)
Fostering in each student the full capacity, creativity and confidence to become agents of change in their personal lives and in their community.
Impact Areas
Inspiration : inviting students to participate in the creative economy and to direct their own future
Innovation : serving as a catalyst for grassroots invention
Education : building a connection between the community and learners
We are particularly interested in how our approach might reach students who don’t fit well into the existing system or who have already dropped out of it. At Maker Faire, there are no winners or losers — anything that’s cool is fair game. It’s not a competition, and there aren’t prizes, so there are no judges deciding who has succeeded and who has failed. Yet Makers — some with two PhDs, others who never graduated from anywhere — are motivated to spend long hours in their studios, shops, kitchens, and garages finishing their projects. Makers work in art, craft, engineering, music, food, science, technology, health, and often in several of these areas at once.
Their projects are thoughtful, challenging, and innovative. But most importantly, we notice that all Makers are curious and motivated people.
In its National Education Technology Plan (2010), the Office of Educational Technology, Department of Education wrote,
The model of 21st-century learning described in this plan calls for engaging and empowering learning experiences for all learners. The model asks that we focus what and how we teach to match what people need to know, how they learn, where and when they will learn, and who needs to learn. It brings state-of- the art technology into learning to enable, motivate, and inspire all students, regardless of background, languages, or disabilities, to achieve. It leverages the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits-all curriculum, pace of teaching, and instructional practices.
This is our challenge. It isn’t enough to train current students for the world of today — we have to train them for tomorrow, a tomorrow that will require them to master technologies that don’t yet exist. Think about it: a child in middle school today will be entering the prime of their careers in 2040. We have no idea what the world will be like then. Therefore it is crucial to develop timeless skills such as curiosity, creativity, and the ability to learn on one’s own. These are precisely the skills that are honed by efforts such as the Makerspace.
We believe the Maker movement captures something about the future for a new direction in education. We know that many teachers are re-energized by their annual visit to Maker Faire, and a few join us in our optimism for making as a way to learn. We hear this time and again from teachers.
The Maker movement exemplifies the kind of passion and personal motivation that inspire innovation. We can engage students as makers who learn how to use tools and processes to help them reach their own goals and realize their own ideas.
How can we translate this intrinsic motivation to education? How can we channel these core values, a shared spirit, ethics, discipline, mutual respect, reciprocity, self-directed learning into how we teach? Or more generally, in a future world, what could schooling look like?
And how can Makerspaces shift how we think about achievement?
These are the questions we hope to answer … and we will answer them, with your help!
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