Through a comparative case study, Sheridan and colleagues explore how makerspaces may function as learning environments. Drawing on field observations, interviews, and analysis of artifacts, videos, and other documents, the authors describe features of three makerspaces and how participants learn and develop through complex design and making practices. They describe how the makerspaces help individuals identify problems, build models, learn and apply skills, revise ideas, and share new knowledge with others. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of their findings for this
In this essay, Erica Halverson and Kimberly Sheridan provide the context for research on the maker movement as they consider the emerging role of making in education. The authors describe the theoretical roots of the movement and draw connections to related research on formal and informal education. They present points of tension between making and formal education practices as they come into contact with one another, exploring whether the newness attributed to the maker movement is really all that new and reflecting on its potential pedagogical impacts on teaching and learning.
The Maker Movement is a community of hobbyists, tinkerers, engineers, hackers, and artists who creatively design and build projects for both playful and useful ends. There is growing interest among educators in bringing making into K-12 education to enhance opportunities to engage in the practices of engineering, specifically, and STEM more broadly. This article describes three elements of the Maker Movement, and associated research needs, necessary to understand its promise for education: 1) digital tools, including rapid prototyping tools and low-cost microcontroller platforms, that
On November 2-3, 2015, the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), hosted the 2015 NSF Maker Summit, in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Planned in response to a Call to Action issued by the White House after the June 2014 White House Maker Faire, the summit was attended by more than 50 individuals representing five different segments of the Maker community. Its goals were to forge connections across the Maker Movement, envision the future of Making for engineering and education communities, and identify how Makerspaces can be
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. How can we come to terms with the complex social impact of new cutting-edge fields like synthetic biology, robotics, genetics and
machine learning? In order to manage these transformative changes, people not only need to understand science and technology, but also to actively participate in shaping a world where our ability to control the building blocks of life and cognition is vastly expanded. The Transmedia Museum will use the interactive, engaging nature of
New forms of co-working spaces and community labs, such as Hackerspaces and Fablabs, but also open science and citizen science initiatives, by involving new actors often described as makers, tinkerers, and hackers enable innovation and research outside the walls of academia and industry. These alternative and global innovation networks are test beds for studying new forms of public engagement and participation in emergent scientific fields, such as nanotechnology. The article shows how these grassroots and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) or Do-It-With- Others (DIWO) research subcultures connect politics
In the last decade, social studies of nanotechnology have been characterized by a specific focus on the role of communication and cultural representations. Scholars have documented a proliferation of the forms through which this research area has been represented, communicated and debated within different social contexts. This Jcom section concentrates on the proliferation of cultural spaces where nanotechnologies are articulated and shaped in society. The intent is that of showing how these different cultural spaces — with their specific features and implications — raise multiple issues and
In this article, we invite you to expand your vision of what it means to work at the intersections of formal and informal science and literacy education by describing how educators have collaborated to create programs that blend science and literacy in schools, in museums, and across these two spaces. In 2012, K–12 teachers from the National Writing Project (NWP) began working with the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) and science museum educators in the National Science Foundation–funded Intersections project, which is being evaluated by Inverness Research. NWP is a network
This document contains the appendices and literature review from the report "Art+Science: Broadening Youth Participation in STEM Learning." It includes assessment tools used during the project.
Art and science represent two powerful human ways of investigating and understanding the natural and social world. Both are creative processes involving acts of observation, interpretation, meaning-making, and the communication of new insights. While standards of evidence may vary between the two fields, there are also many common practices. Many artists, for example, employ a range of computational, digital and engineering practices. Many scientists are guided in part by aesthetic considerations in the formulation of questions, theories, and models. In this report we share the results of a
This report summarizes findings from a research-practice partnership investigating STEM-rich making in afterschool programs serving young people from communities historically under-represented in STEM. The three-year study identified key dimensions related to (1) How STEM-Rich Making advances afterschool programmatic goals related to socio-emotional and intellectual growth for youth; (2) Key characteristics of programs that effectively engage youth historically marginalized in STEM fields; and (3) Staff development needs to support equity-oriented STEM-Rich Making programs.
Research on mathematical reasoning and learning has long been a central part of the classroom and formal education literature (e.g., National Research Council, 2001, 2005). However, much less attention has been paid to how children and adults engage with and learn about math outside of school, including everyday settings and designed informal learning environments, such as interactive math exhibits in science centers. With the growing recognition of the importance of informal STEM education (National Research Council, 2009, 2015), researchers, educators, and policymakers are paying more