"Making and Tinkering" links science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning (STEM) to the do-it-yourself "maker" movement, where people of all ages "create and share things in both the digital and physical world" (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013). This paper examines designing what Resnick and Rosenbaum (2013) call "contexts for tinkerability" within the social design experiment of El Pueblo Mágico (EPM) -- a design approach organized around a cultural historical view of learning and development. We argue that this theoretical perspective reorganizes normative approaches to STEM education
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Lisa SchwartzDaniela DigiacomoKris Gutierrez
The Common Core's higher academic standards are forcing schools into a false dichotomy of reducing playtime in favor of more time to learn math and literacy. But play can deepen learning even in core content areas.
Afterschool continues to be promoted as a complementary setting to school for strengthening science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education (for example, Krishnamurthi, Bevan, Rinehart, & Coulon, 2013). This is a reasonable idea: 10.2 million children and youth in the U.S. participate in structured afterschool programs (Afterschool Alliance, 2014), and the flexibility of afterschool settings allows for innovative approaches to STEM exploration and engagement.
Many communities across the country are developing "maker spaces," environments that combine physical fabrication equipment, social communities of people working together, and educational activities for learning how to design and create objects. Increasingly, maker spaces and maker technologies are being designed to provide extended learning opportunities for school-aged young people. Unfortunately, few youth from under-represented populations have had the opportunity to participate in these maker spaces, and many communities do not have the resources to establish facilities dedicated to making activities. This project, a collaboration of faculty at California State University, San Marcos and San Diego County Office of Education, the Vista Unified School District, and the San Diego Fab Lab, is a feasibility study that will work to address these needs by implementing and evaluating a pilot Mobile Making program in an underserved youth population. It will bring Making to four after-school programs in underserved communities in San Diego by using a van to take both equipment and undergraduate student mentors to program sites. At these sites, between 50% and 90% of the students are Hispanic or Latino and between 40% and 90% are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. The project employs a research-based approach to the design and implementation of the Mobile Making program, coupled with an evidenced-based plan for developing a model for future dissemination. Project objectives are: increasing the participants' interest, self-efficacy, and perception of the relevance of Making/STEM in everyday life; identifying and overcoming challenges associated with a Mobile Making program; developing a model for implementing and assessing Mobile Making in underserved communities; and disseminating materials and guides for practitioners. Development will be guided by five research-based principles for design of out-of-school time programs in underserved communities: access to resources; ethnically diverse near-peer leaders; authentic activities; legitimacy within the community; and ongoing input from participants. To inform program development and implementation, including continuous monitoring and adjustment throughout the two-year initiative, the evaluation component will use a mixed methods approach to study outcomes with respect to the students, their parents and the undergraduate mentors. Future work will apply the lessons learned in the project to guide implementations and study the model's applicability in other informal education settings. The dissemination plan will include publication of project findings, activities, practitioner's guides, and the model for implementing making programs in underserved communities.
Since August of 2011, Project iLASER (Investigations with Light And Sustainable Energy Resources) has engaged children, youth and adults in public science education and hands-on activities across the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border, from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. The two main themes of Project iLASER activities focus on sustainable energy and materials science. More than 1,000 children have been engaged in the hands-on activities developed through Project iLASER at 20+ sites, primarily in after-school settings in Boys & Girls Clubs. Sites include Boys & Girls Clubs in California (Chula Vista, Imperial Beach, El Centro and Brawley); Arizona (Nogales); New Mexico (Las Cruces); and Texas (El Paso, Midland-Odessa, Edinburg and Corpus Christi). The project was co-funded between the NSF Division of Chemistry (CHE) and the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL).
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Southwestern CollegeDavid BrownDavid Hecht
Nationally, there is tremendous interest in enhancing participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Providing rich opportunities for engagement in science and engineering practices may be key to developing a much larger cadre of young people who grow up interested in and pursue future STEM education and career options. One particularly powerful way to engage children in such exploration and playful experimentation may be through learning experiences that call for tinkering with real objects and tools to make and remake things. Tinkering is an important target for research and educational practice for at least two reasons: (1) tinkering experiences are frequently social, involving children interacting with educators and family members who can support STEM-relevant tinkering in various ways and (2) tinkering is more open-ended than many other kinds of building experiences (e.g., puzzles, making a model airplane), because it is the participants' own unique questions and objectives that guide the activity. Thus, tinkering provides a highly accessible point of entry into early STEM learning for children and families who do not all share the same backgrounds, circumstances, interests, and expertise. This Research-in-Service to Practice project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. The project will take place in the Tinkering Lab exhibit at Chicago Children's Museum. The research will investigate how reflective interactions between parents and children (ages 6-8) during tinkering activities ultimately impact child engagement in STEM. Design-based research (DBR) is well-suited to the iterative and contextually-rich process of tinkering. Using a DBR approach, researchers and museum facilitators will be trained to prompt variations of simple reflection strategies at different time points between family members as a way to strengthen children's engagement with, and memory of these shared tinkering events. Through progressive refinement, each cycle of testing will lead to new hypotheses that can be tested in the subsequent round of observations. The operationalization of study constructs and their measurement will come organically from families' activities in the Tinkering Lab and will be developed in consultation with members of the advisory board. Data collection strategies will include observation and interviews; a series of coding schemes will be used to make sense of the data. The research will result in theoretical and practical understanding of ways to enhance STEM engagement and learning by young children and their families through tinkering. A diverse group of at least 350 children and their families will be involved. The project will provide much needed empirical results on how to promote STEM engagement and learning in informal science education settings. It will yield useful information and resources for informal science learning practitioners, parents, and other educators who look to advance STEM learning opportunities for children. This research is being conducted through a partnership between researchers at Loyola University of Chicago and Northwestern University and museum staff and educators at the Chicago Children's Museum.
In this paper, commissioned as part of a consensus study on successful out-of-school STEM learning, we draw on the research literature to consider (1) what is known about the impact of tinkering and making experiences on school-aged children’s learning (interest in, engagement with and understanding of STEM in particular); (2) the emerging design principles and pedagogies that characterize tinkering and making programs; and (3) the specific tensions and possibilities within this movement for equity-oriented teaching and learning.
The maker movement is fundamentally changing the way educators and educational researchers envision teaching and learning. This movement contends making — an active process of building, designing, and innovating with tools and materials to produce shareable artifacts — is a naturally rich and authentic learning trajectory (Martinez & Stager, 2013). Makerspaces are places where making happens in community. I craft my dissertation to explore these two defining characteristics of makerspaces through a comparative case study (Stake, 1995) and a design experiment (Brown, 1992). In the comparative
Situated in the shade of palm trees in the Miami, FL area, the REM Learning Center serves children aged 12 months to nine years. By having two dedicated Maker Corps Members during the summer, they could increase the number of visits children had to the "Play, Make, Share" studio, continue to experiment with different materials and facilitation strategies, and begin to build the expertise of their staff.
Our role as external evaluators is to provide Maker Ed and its stakeholders with an outside perspective on two questions. First: How does Maker Corps impact the MCMs and Host Sites that participate and the audiences they serve? Second: In what ways can the Maker Corps program improve to better serve these participants and their audiences? This report is an executive summary of our full report, in which we present a complete summary of the findings from surveys, interviews, and case studies during the 2014 Maker Corps program.
Maker Corps increases the capacity of youth-serving organizations nationwide to engage youth and families in making. Diverse Maker Corps Members expand the current network of makers, mentors, and community leaders poised to lead creative experiences for youth. (http://makered.org/makercorps/) In this report of Maker Corps' second year, we address the following questions: 1. How does Maker Corps impact the Maker Corps Members, participating Host Sites, and the audiences they serve? 2. In what ways can the Maker Corps program improve to better serve these participants and their audiences? We