Tinkering creates a bridging point between a learner’s personal interests and experiences and a broad range of possible learning outcomes. It offers valuable opportunities to engage all students in STEM and fosters a more inclusive STEM education. In this way, it is very much aligned with a Science Capital Teaching Approach: fundamentally, it is a highly personalised pedagogy, which allows the learner to follow their own interests and set their own goals.
This resource has been designed to help teachers integrate the Tinkering approach and the Science Capital framework in their practice
The Year in ISE is a slidedoc designed to track and characterize field growth, change and impact, important publications, and current topics in ISE in 2018. Use it to inform new strategies, find potential collaborators for your projects, and support proposal development. Scope This slidedoc highlights a selection of developments and resources in 2018 that were notable and potentially useful for the informal STEM education field. It is not intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive, nor to provide endorsement. To manage the scope and length, we have focused on meta analyses, consensus reports
In this literature review, we seek to understand in what ways aspects of computer science education and making and makerspaces may support the ambitious vision for science education put forth in A Framework for K-12 Science as carried forward in the Next Generation Science Standards. Specifically, we examine how computer science and making and makerspace approaches may inform a project-based learning approach for supporting three-dimensional science learning at the elementary level. We reviewed the methods and findings of both recently published articles by influential scholars in computer
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Samuel SeveranceSusan CodereEmily MillerDeborah Peek-BrownJoseph Krajcik
This CAISE report is designed to track and characterize sector growth, change and impact, important publications, hot topics/trends, new players, funding, and other related areas in Informal STEM Education (ISE) in 2017. The goal is to provide information and links for use by ISE professionals, science communicators, and interested stakeholders who want to discover new strategies and potential collaborators for project and proposal development. Designed as a slide presentation and divided into sectors, it can be used modularly or as a complete report. Each sector reports on research, events
Through a generous three-year grant from the Abundance Foundation, the Agency by Design (AbD) initiative at Project Zero, a research organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, began to investigate the promises, practices, and pedagogies of maker-centered learning. Over the last two years we have simultaneously pursued three strands of work: 1) a review of pertinent literature; 2) interviews and site visits with leading maker educators; and 3) action research and concept development. We’re now commencing our third year of work. Our active data collection stage is over. We are
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Harvard Project ZeroHarvard Project Zero
Cultures develop when people find ways to play, make, and share. This report describes how human cultures can be characterised by their similarities rather than their differences, and emphasises the importance of recognising playfulness and creativity to develop societies prepared to accommodate the rapid changes associated with technology and globalisation.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
LEGO FoundationDavid GauntlettBo Stjerne Thompson
The Maker Program Blueprint offers a template for afterschool or summer programs and addresses the types of spaces that can be used, ideas about schedules and format, and the materials and personnel needed to create and sustain a program.
What makes “making”—the next generation of inventing and do-it-yourself—worth paying attention to? In this report, we explore the three categories of makers, the ecosystem growing around those categories, the role technology plays in this ecosystem, and, finally, how business can take advantage of the opportunities this movement represents.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
John HagelJohn Seely BrownDleesha Kulasooriya
The Maker Movement is inspiring thousands of young people across the nation to tinker with and tackle problems involving design, engineering and programming. This report from the third Making Meaning Symposium takes a critical look at describing and documenting learning that takes place when young people make. The symposium brought together nearly 150 makers, funders, educational researchers, educators from K–12 and informal settings, museum and community based leaders, and policymakers. The aim of this national symposium was to craft a strategy for documenting the variety of learning and
This pilot study was funded by the Museum of Science’s Women in Science Committee to examine the impact of competition on children participating in Design Challenges engineering experiences, and in particular, to see what effect, if any, the competitive design of these engineering activities had on girl participants. The research questions for this study included: 1. How does competition affect participants' engagement in engineering activities? 1.a Does this differ for boys and girls? 2. How does competition affect participants' desire to take part in future engineering activities? 2.a. Does
This report applies a practice-based approach to learning and making in the context of a museum makerspace (The Makeshop at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh). This perspective draws upon theories of cultural and social learning, which assert an understanding of learning as fundamentally tied to the social and cultural contexts in which it occurs and focuses on the "practices" that define learning communities. The practices identified in this report are observable and/or reportable evidence of learners' engagement in making as a learning process.