Gizmos and Making

The day before I started drafting the final chapter in a book I’m writing with a colleague on make, my 7th grade son came bounding out of school with a guitar pick he’d made on a 3-D printer. The assistant principal who was accompanying him was amused that my son had never used a 3-D printer considering the copious Professional Development I’d done at the school around the make and my input in the forming of the Maker Space to begin with.

But that’s precisely the thing I want to end the maker book with and what I want to say in this blog post. Three-D Printers and other expensive electronic gizmos do not make a Maker Space. They are cool. They are awesome. Kids can do amazing things with them, but when looking at the budget, I find that 3-D printers do not top the list.

My son is definitely a maker. He is constantly tinkering, making and building and hacking. It’s the way he learns best and some of his most exciting times as a learner. He transfers the tinkering and hacking ideas into more traditional school work as he manipulates ideas to learn math, science, ELA, Social Studies and Latin in more traditional settings. He tinkers, he tries stuff out. He plays with the information. He has false starts, fails and tries again. He transfers this mindset into traditional school because he is entrenched in the make culture (and his Mom reminds him of it constantly), but his materials are not expensive or fancy. They are largely up-cycled. Old cardboard boxes become elaborate ferret mazes. Broken toys become new hacked creations. Glue sticks and colored masking tape are constantly used up along with fabric scraps. He rarely knows what he’s planning to make when he starts to tinker. He simply enjoys the process. The results are cool sometimes and sometimes a mess. It doesn’t matter. He is thinking like an engineer, a scientist, a mathematician, and artist, and a writer. He is making STEAM. Without a 3-D Printer. So, though I feel compelled to say that he put a 3-D Printer on his birthday list after being introduced to it, I’m here to tell you that a big budget is not what makes the Maker Space or the maker. It’s the willingness to dive into stuff that is lying around or pick up a pencil and make something, including and maybe most especially a mess.

Things that I would invest in for a maker space are:

People

Scissors

Cardstock paper in all sorts of colors

Masking tape in of all sorts of colors

Yarn

Glue guns and hot glue

Recycled cardboard

Broken toys

Fabric scraps

Good finds at thrift stores