Four Things I Learned by Doing
My Week in the CRI’s Makerspace
I have never considered myself much of a maker. As a kid, I enjoyed creating things with play dough, but my works of art were more or less all variations on the theme of the four-limbed potato. The grand creations I pictured were often left unfinished due to boredom and frustration, and at the end of projects, more paint was found in my hair and on my clothes than on my canvas (especially when, due to poor awareness of my surroundings, I knocked over the can). Don’t get me wrong, I was and still am creative; I simply prefer media that don’t involve using one’s hands as much, such as photography or writing. I was therefore very excited and curious to spend a week in the CRI’s makerspace.
As a first-year graduate in the EdTech Master’s program at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI) in Paris, I not only get to study innovative educational practices, but also experience them firsthand as a learner. Our third week in September was meant as an introduction to the CRI’s makerspace, L’OpenLab, and a first approach of rising trends in education: makerspaces and the maker movement in general.
In short: the maker movement in education
Ready to fit into this foreign world, I decided to familiarize myself with the practices of its inhabitants. Halverson and Sheridan define the maker movement as “the growing number of people who are engaged in the creative production of artifacts in their daily lives and who find physical and digital forums to share their processes and products with others”. Of course, humans have always made things. The particularity of the maker movement is the democratization of making, enabled by the growing availability of tools and materials (such as the much-discussed 3D printers) in spaces such as makerspaces and FabLabs, making them both cheaper and more accessible.
Making in education is not new either. As early as 1896, American psychologist, philosopher, and educator John Dewey implemented his “learning-by-doing” pedagogy in the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. In the 1950s, Seymour Papert built his theory of constructionism around project-based learning and the idea that “learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product.” However, what is different today is that more and more educational institutions, such as schools, universities and libraries, are reflecting on making tools available for learners to “make things”.
Thus, I arrived at L’OpenLab with one question: what does one learn when making something? How does the learning experience differ from a traditional one?
Making something
So here I was, propelled into this world of 3-D printers, CNC machines, laser-cutters, electronics and tinkering. All the machines seemed full of possibilities.
We were then told to make groups and start on our assignment of the week, which was to… you guessed it, “make something.” We were to design an educational tool or product and build it using the tools at our disposal. My team’s project aimed to introduce seeing people to the Braille alphabet. It involved an Arduino board, LEDs, and conductive paint, to be put together thanks to basic electronics, soldering, and programming skills. However, what seemed like an easy project turned out to be a huge challenge for us.
The following three days were a true emotional and mental rollercoaster. I was immensely discouraged when I realized that I was unable to build even the simplest electrical circuit. I spent hours watching online videos about breadboards, trying to understand the logic behind the forest of wires and resistors I was seeing on my screen. Perhaps because French graduate school is not a place where students are usually encouraged to do things they are beginners in, or perhaps due to my inherent perfectionism, I was overwhelmed by feelings of failure and inadequacy. The next day, armed with newfound strength, I was filled with a rush of incredible satisfaction when we finally managed to make LEDs light up at the push of a button. From its conception to its realization, our project had gone from grandiose to minuscule. It may not have been a Sistine chapel, but for us it was a masterpiece.
What I want to share here is what I took away from what I consider an extremely fulfilling learning experience. Here are the four most important things I learned while making things at L’OpenLab, and why I think it’s important for education and society to encourage not only kids, but everyone, to make things.
It’s okay not to know how to do something
…what matters is to know where you’re going
Unlike traditional education, learning by doing is not deductive. You don’t apply a rule you have just been taught by someone else; you identify the rule you need to learn, look for it, teach it to yourself, and apply it. Actually, and often, the rule doesn’t work, or you can’t find it, or you can’t understand it, or you don’t need one, and you just keep on trying and experimenting until it works. The point is: it’s okay not to know how you’re going to do it at the beginning.
Paula Bontà is the co-founder of the Playful Invention Company and a consultant for the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. She is one of the creators of ScratchJr, teaching creative programming to 5-to-7-years-old. During a discussion with our Master’s program, she explained that the most important part of the learning process is to know how to acquire a skill. It is indeed an incredibly important metacognitive competency, useful in most aspects of life; very rarely outside of formal education will one be asked to execute something perfectly mastered.
Moreover, this mentality is also very freeing: you are not constrained by what you can do; rather, you are motivated by what you want to do.
It’s okay to be frustrated
…what matters is to persevere
However, starting something you don’t know how to do will bring about frustration. I was actually surprised by how frustrated I was: I was mentally and physically exhausted by all the obstacles that were keeping me away from my (small, short-term) goal. Because we were allowed to choose what we wanted to work on, we were very involved and committed to the project, and the impossibility to build it was all the more discouraging. We were not doing it for the sake of the grade, or to make our teacher happy; we had pictured it in our mind and now wanted to make it a reality.
One of the key topics in education has been how to develop soft skills such as motivation and perseverance. “Learning by making” might be a way to improve such competencies. When students are making something of their choice, they will be much more likely to want to keep going despite obstacles, and may naturally raise their resistance to frustration in order to achieve the goal they set themselves.
It’s okay to try and fail
…what matters is to know why you failed and why you succeeded
The learning experience in the context of making is at least as much about the process as about the result. You have to accept failure as part of the experience. Failure can happen at the micro-level (not being able to get something to work the first time) or at the macro-level (not managing to make your vision a reality). While you can avoid macro-level failure, micro-level failure is inevitable and even desirable. Making things is an iterative process.
This takes away the burden of failure that is so often put on the shoulders of students, and opens up the potential for discovery. If it’s okay to fail, it’s okay to take risks, experiment and question things. Learning with this mentality helps develop a true scientific mind. As Claude Levi-Strauss said, “the scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.”
It’s okay to think big
…what matters is to be ready to ask for help
My group was composed of three people. None of us knew much about electronics, and I was the only one with (limited) experience in programming. Yet, we allowed ourselves to imagine making something that involved both, because we knew we could ask other, more experienced people for help. Collaboration and mutual support are key in the making process, and it’s a wonderful thing to benefit from them and learn how to rely on them.
In the end, although we didn’t achieve what we initially envisioned, we still made something, and it was incredibly empowering. Did I fall in love with making things and playing with machines? Probably not, although I did spend a lot of time engraving silly things on wood with the laser cutter. However, it was a very enriching process, and the philosophy of “making” teaches many lessons worth exploring in traditional academic education: self-motivation, resilience, grit, curiosity and desire to improve and overcome greater and greater challenges.
For further reflection on the maker movement in education, I recommend this excellent article by Erica Rosenfeld Halverson and Kimberly Sheridan, giving an overview of the characteristics of the maker movement, the history of “making” in education, the implications of the interaction of maker movement and formal education, and how the maker movement can transform “what counts” as learning.
