"Making and Tinkering" links science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning (STEM) to the do-it-yourself "maker" movement, where people of all ages "create and share things in both the digital and physical world" (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013). This paper examines designing what Resnick and Rosenbaum (2013) call "contexts for tinkerability" within the social design experiment of El Pueblo Mágico (EPM) -- a design approach organized around a cultural historical view of learning and development. We argue that this theoretical perspective reorganizes normative approaches to STEM education
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Lisa SchwartzDaniela DigiacomoKris Gutierrez
The Common Core's higher academic standards are forcing schools into a false dichotomy of reducing playtime in favor of more time to learn math and literacy. But play can deepen learning even in core content areas.
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
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.
As Maker and Tinkering programs expand, educators are in need of new ways of noticing and capturing learning. In particular, because maker programs are so facilitation-heavy, and physically active, there is a need for ways for educators to monitor learning in situ. In this paper, Bevan, Gutwill, Petrich and Wilkinson explore how jointly negotiated research led to new insights about what counts as learning in the context of STEM-rich tinkering in ways that can support formative, embedded, and naturalistic assessments.
In order to reframe how learning is organized in traditionally male-dominated areas of STEM education, the authors show how collaborative girl-boy pairs engaged with an “e-textiles” making activity. E-textiles are circuit activities combining needles, fabric, and conductive thread, challenging traditional gender practices related to both sewing and electronics.
Afterschool continues to be promoted as a complementary setting to school for strengthening science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education (for example, Krishnamurthi, Bevan, Rinehart, & Coulon, 2013). This is a reasonable idea: 10.2 million children and youth in the U.S. participate in structured afterschool programs (Afterschool Alliance, 2014), and the flexibility of afterschool settings allows for innovative approaches to STEM exploration and engagement.
This paper presents a novel data analytic approach to collect detailed information from visual artworks. This new method provides researchers with a framework to compare, analyze, and review in a systematic way large quantities of data from visual productions. Drawing on principles of art historical criticism, our research team devised a comprehensive coding scheme that captures both technical and content attributes. The coding scheme is configured to record specific, fundamental features for each artwork, providing an instrument for collecting data and cross-examining codes to reveal content
This paper draws on ethnographic data to bring equity to the fore within discussions of tinkering and making. Vossoughi, Escudé, Kong & Hooper argue that equity lies in the how of teaching and learning through specific ways of: designing making environments, using pedagogical language, integrating students’ cultural and intellectual histories, and expanding the meanings and purposes of STEM learning. The authors identify and exemplify emergent equity-oriented design principles within the Tinkering After-School Program—a partnership between the Exploratorium and the Boys and Girls Clubs of San
The field of informal science education has embraced “making” and design activities as a powerful approach to engaging learners. This chapter by Blikstein finds that in order to create disruptive spaces where students can learn STEM, design and build inventive projects, educators . This paper provides theoretical background and concrete cases that illuminate program design and implementation issues related to making.
Petrich, Wilkinson, and Bevan (2013) explore three areas of design principles related to tinkering. The authors share their thinking related to the activity design, environmental design, and facilitation practices involved in creating and supporting rich tinkering experiences for museumgoers. They wrote a chapter on tinkering, which describes how the group initiated, cultivated, and facilitated a making and tinkering space on the floor of a museum. Specifically the chapter outlines principles for the activity design, the tinkering space, and the facilitation practices. The authors conclude by
Vossoughi and Bevan (2014) conducted a literature review of educational research on making and tinkering. They considered what was known about learning opportunities for young people afforded by high-quality tinkering and making experiences. Specifically they reviewed the historical roots of making, the emerging design principles that characterized tinkering and making programs, the pedagogical theories and practices that lead to supportive and collaborative learning environments, as well as the possibilities and tensions associated with equity-oriented teaching and learning.