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
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
Making, tinkering, and other informal design and engineering experiences offer rich opportunities to engage
children and adults in mathematics and build mathematical skills, knowledge, and interests. But how can educators
successfully integrate mathematics into these experiences? One approach to answering this question is to better understand how children and adults engage with and think about mathematics outside of school, in every day and informal learning environments. As part of the NSF-funded Math in
the Making project, Pattison, Rubin, and Wright (2016) synthesized the research on
Although there is a growing body of research on mathematics in informal learning environments (Pattison, Rubin, & Wright, 2016; Rubin, Garibay, & Pattison, 2016), less has been done to understand how math can be integrated into other informal STEM education settings or topics, and how this integration might engage those who do not already have positive attitudes about math. Over the last decade there has been a proliferation of out-of-school environments that foster building, making, tinkering, and design activities (Bevan, Gutwill, Petrich, & Wilkinson, 2015; Vossoughi, Escudé, Kong, & Hooper
Through a study of 14 preschool classrooms serving low-income children from diverse ethnic backgrounds, the authors illustrate how carefully incorporating play-based learning into curricula can improve both literacy and social competence skills. The results illuminate how to more deeply engage learners with informal science education.
This poster was presented at the 2016 Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) PI Meeting held in Bethesda, MD on February 29-March 2. The project will provide much needed empirical results on how to promote children’s STEM engagement and learning in informal science education settings. The project will yield useful information and resources for informal science learning practitioners, parents, and other educators who look to advance STEM learning opportunities for children.