Maker Learning: Integrating Maker Ed into the School Curriculum
The constructionist learning theory, the maker movement and maker education are three ideas that have inspired me to chase a new kind of education: Maker Learning. In this article I will introduce these ideas before proposing a new approach to modern education that allows these ideas to transform the way we teach without sacrificing what we teach.
Part 1: An introduction to constructionism
When training to become a teacher I spent a lot of time reading and writing about the ideas within Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and Lev Vygotsky’s theory of social constructivism. These learning theories form the central tenets of progressive education, and they go a long way to shape undergraduate teachers’ understanding of their role as a teacher. I stepped into my first classroom with the understanding that my task was not to directly transmit information as I understood it, but to give my students the experiences that are required to construct information about the world for themselves. This is why we place so much value in live demonstrations, open questioning, school trips and practical activities.
Later in my career I discovered that the constructivist learning theory inspired another theory that took a much more literal approach to the idea of ‘constructing knowledge’. Constructionism is not a new idea. It was developed by Professor Seymour Papert through the 1980’s and has inspired teachers around the world to embrace craft as a medium for sense-making and communicating knowledge. As technology has become more widely available and affordable it has become a powerful medium with which to achieve this.
Constructionism might be recognised as the physical manifestation of constructivist learning. Students still construct ideas and mental modals about the world, but they are also given the resources and encouragement to use this knowledge to construct things that are tangible and shareable. The beauty being that these creations can become both a learning opportunity for the maker and a window into the mind of the student for the educator.
When constructionist learning models are used students develop a sense of agency in their community as they learn to construct creative solutions to authentic problems. This not only gives the learner time and space to make sense of the world in a personalized and holistic way, it encourages the learner to build and interact with surrounding knowledge communities.
At the time that Papert was sharing these ideas, the technologies that were available to learners were a lot more limited than they are today. As such Papert mostly discusses the use of computers as a tool for students to construct and test their ideas digitally. However, in the last twenty years we have seen an upsurge in the availability of maker technologies, ushering in the maker movement…
Part 2: The Maker Movement
The maker movement is a term that refers to the individuals and communities of independent innovators, designers and tinkerers that are making things. It is a term that embodies the incredible things that are being achieved by these makers as they create unique artifacts. Importantly, they often do this with more than a ‘Do It Yourself’ but a ‘Do It Together’ attitude.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the maker movement began. After all, it’s true that people have been making things since the dawn of time. If you were to try and pin a year for the democratization of the maker movement as we know it today, you could do a lot worse than to pick 2005. That year marked the first publication of Make: Magazine which serves as a global soapbox for makers to share their projects and knowledge. It is also the year that the website Etsy launched, offering an online marketplace for makers to sell all kinds of creations. Suddenly makers could more easily reach customers interested in their handmade items. Finally, 2005 is the year that the Arduino programmable microcontroller was produced. This small, cheap electronics board offered makers with some knowledge of physical computing an open-source and re-programmable microcontroller to create working electronic prototypes.
Throughout the early 2000’s 3D printers were also becoming gradually more commercially available and in 2009, MakerBot released open source DIY kits so that makers could build their own 3D printers. That same year Kickstarter launched, giving makers an online space for raising the capitol they would require for ambitious commercial projects. As the maker movement gained traction hackathons and maker fairs grew in popularity and in 2014 even the White House could be found hosting its very own maker fair.
The term ‘make’ can of course cover a huge array of project types but leaf through enough issues of Make: Magazine and you’ll find that the most popular technologies used by these communities are programming, prototype electronics and fabrication. This mirrors the community they represent as 87% engage in electronics and 75% in digital fabrication (Source)
Part 3: Maker Education
It didn’t take long for educators to take notice of the sudden leap in accessibility to a wide range of tools that can support constructionist learning. Forward thinking schools are now building their own maker spaces to support the integration of maker education. The impact of the maker movement in academia has lead to a new term: Maker Education (or ‘Maker Ed’ for short). Maker Ed has grown to become a very broad term that indicates the application of hands-on creative activities that are aimed at problem solving. Because of the focus on problem solving, Maker Ed is closely tied with Project Based Learning and because of the use of technology it is also a popular learning approach for STEAM education. However, neither PBL or STEAM education require that physical things are crafted.
I stated earlier that I recognize 2005 as the real start of the maker movement. If you were to ask me when the ideas surrounding Maker Education really got going I would say 2013. This year saw the publication of two seminal texts for Maker Education, Dale Dougherty’s short text “The Maker Mindset” and the textbook “Invent to Learn” by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager. Whilst I might not have encountered Maker Education myself for another three years, I can find no better indication across the last two decades that Maker Education was equipped to revolutionize the way students learned.
Part 4: Maker Learning
We have seen that Maker Education encompasses the attitudes and mindsets derived from the maker movement and that it encourages students to use these to change the world around them. For the successful implementation of Maker Ed in schools, there is a specific type of technology integration that should happen. I call this type of integration ‘Maker Learning’.
I believe that Maker Ed has the ability to transform the educational landscape, and I commend all schools for incorporating the necessary technologies and time for these projects. However, when new platforms and technologies come into vogue it can be tempting to rush the old out for the new without giving proper consideration towards the level of integration that the technology has with the intended conceptual learning. In my time spent as a learning technologies coach, my job would often involve determining whether or not new technologies were genuinely transforming the learning, or simply substituting one educational approach with another. It is perhaps this experience that leads me to recognize two dangers as we rush towards Maker centered learning.
One: The baby goes out with the bathwater
When we add time for Maker Education to our curriculum, we remove time that would otherwise be spent in subject areas. Often this also results in a removal of contact time with subject specialists. We must be careful to ensure that this transaction results in a net positive impact on the quality of the education that we are providing. Giving students time to invent, collaborate and create is all well and good, but we must be careful not to take away opportunities to learn from experts in the process.
Two: Making and Learning become siloed
As more schools purchase maker technologies and allocate time for open-ended project building there is a rising need for connections to be created between the maker projects and the academic content. I have witnessed schools become increasingly disconnected as their maker space becomes a closely guarded resource used by only a privileged few. This can easily lead to animosity across a school as other departments see little more than the drain on their own budgets.
Maker Ed is by its very nature interdisciplinary and its benefits can only be fully realized when students and teachers learn to incorporate multidisciplinary ideas and concepts into their making. In short, it is imperative that the making and the learning support one another.
When we focus on the making too much we end up with a handful of 3D Printers feverishly churning out thirty nearly identical luggage tags because the learning got lost in the excitement to use the technology. When we focus on the learning too much, we end up with students full of knowledge but with absolutely no idea about its practical application in the world. Maker learning intends to be where the subject specialists and the maker space creatives meet.
Introducing: Maker Learner Projects
The essential idea behind Maker Learner projects are that they offer bitesize activities that showcase both the workings of maker technologies and some form of STEAM knowledge. I believe that the best method for connecting making to learning in today’s educational landscape is through the development, collection and curation of these projects.
The beauty of projects like this is they can be easily built into existing units or carried out at home. Whilst Maker Education and PBL might focus on long term projects that culminate with complete solutions to real world problems, maker learning is focused on teaching subject knowledge using maker technologies. These projects must be safe, open ended enough to allow for some element of play and most importantly lead to students constructing knowledge. Here are some examples:
Example 1: Learning about Colour with an RGB LED
The list of electronics components that students can build machines with is vast. If students are unfamiliar with the components that are available to them, how can they ever invent? How many ‘Eureka’ moments are missed because a student simply didn’t know how the technologies available to them worked?
This project is a really quick but really powerful display of Ohm’s law and colour theory. By changing the resistance of a circuit powering each colour of an RGB LED students can manually create a variety of colours. The lesson starts with a discussion about how changing the resistance of a circuit changes the current that’s able to pass through it which in turn changes the power that is deliverable to an LED light. Once the reasons for changing the colours of an LED are understood, students can play with the creation of colour and come to their own conclusions about how RGB lights work to produce every colour. As with all projects I am creating, this project has been written up on the Maker Learners website here. I have also linked a short video explaining the science.
Example 2: Using Python to explore trends in the periodic table
This project is excellent for teaching chemistry, the python programming language and computational thinking. As a science teacher I felt that I was giving my students a powerful tool for inquiry whilst teaching them chemistry at the same time. In addition to this, the computational thinking and python programming skills would absolutely serve them well in any maker projects that required the development of a program that solved a problem.
The International Baccalaureate Organization asked me to write an article about this project, which you can read here. As with the last example, I have also shared the project brief on Maker Learners here.
(Note: A project that began in Maker Learners but is growing legs of its own is Python Physics. If you’re interested in python and physics please do reach out to be to contribute to this project!)
As you can see, these projects could easily be built into one or two STEM or STEAM lessons. Their purpose is threefold:
- To offer students a snapshot of how a maker technology works on as fundamental a level as possible.
- To teach a little subject knowledge.
- To help students develop the skills and techniques that they might incorporate into larger Maker Ed and/or PBL activities later on.
Maker Teachers, Assemble!
I hope you’re as excited as I am about the technology revolution that’s taking place right now. If what I’ve said in this article has you smiling and nodding, I urge you to reach out to me. I’m a full time teacher and I can’t do this on my own.
I’m looking for help to connect as many maker technologies to as much STEAM learning as possible. Making these connections demands a special kind of educator that I like to call a ‘Maker Teacher’…
If you think that young people are able to improve the world around them, you might be a maker teacher.
If you think that technology should be understood and not just passively used, you might be a maker teacher.
If you see knowledge in the things around you and you want others to see that too, you might be a maker teacher.
If you’re a maker teacher, join me by signing up at https://makerlearners.com/ where you can instantly start sharing projects to join me on the Maker Teacher hall of fame.
