Got Makerspaces! Developing Purpose and Context for Making in K-12

by Caroline Haebig, Digital Learning Coordinator, School District of New Berlin

STEM programming, Computer Science standards, Makerspaces and 1:1 technology. As a leader in education, chances are you are working in a district that is currently exploring, developing, or refining a program or process related to one or all of these timely topics. After engaging in conversations around these topics at the local, state and national level, it is clear that there are a wide range of beliefs and practices around STEM-based curriculum, the role of computer science standards, and how makerspaces serve to prepare students for college and career readiness, redefine instruction and foster student achievement.

This article is one in a series that will share the process our district has engaged in and outcomes we’ve achieved in order to further develop the college career ready vision of our graduate. Specifically, this series will highlight how we are developing a maker culture, creating makerspaces, and incorporating design thinking, in order to prepare students to be technologically literate, inventive problem solvers.

Maker Culture: Redefining Opportunities for Student Innovation

When we first set out to explore makerspaces and the concept of making, we quickly learned that there are many different perspectives on what purpose makerspaces and maker learning served. It was clear that the first part of our journey was to define what making meant in our district. After creating a definition of making, we also focused on identifying the type of literacies that students need to be college and career ready and maker learning could help us achieve those student literacies. Joseph E. Anoun, the author of Robot-proof: Higher education in the age of artificial intelligence, explores the necessity for higher education to redevelop the learner experience to focus on experiential learning. Specifically, Anoun’s work defines and focuses on the three literacies that will be most crucial to help current students and workers to be successful in an age of rapid technological advancement and artificial intelligence. These include: technological literacy, data literacy, and human literacy. In short, technological literacy is the ability to have an understanding of how current and emerging technologies are impacting industry practices and how people live. The smart technologies of today gather more data than ever before, it takes data literacy skills to know how to analyze and leverage this data in meaningful ways. Once data analysis is achieved, human literacy can be employed to discover new ways to improve the human experience with meaningful applications of this data. During our process, we discovered that maker learning experiences guided by the design thinking process could be a way to develop student’ technological literacy skills and engage them in authentic problem-solving experiences.

Technological Literacy vs Educational Technology: What’s the Difference?

Technological literacy is different than instructional and educational technology. Instructional technology offers powerful opportunities for students to demonstrate creativity, engage in collaboration and support modes for communication for the purpose of learning. Using these tools strictly for improving workflow and increasing options for students to have voice and choice in how they express their learning does not necessarily translate into students being technologically literate.

For us, developing a maker culture in our district is a vehicle for students to develop technological literacy as it relates to specific aspects of their curriculum. Specifically, our maker learning process is rooted in the design thinking approach and focused on development of technological and data literacies as students define specific problems and create and test prototypes authentic solutions. We want teachers to be able to identify how curriculum can be the vehicle for how students engage in design thinking and develop appropriate technological literacy skills.

In short, we believe that this technological literacy skill development is applicable to a wide range of curricula. Our intent is to democratize how students gain access to unique tools and capacities for prototyping and testing authentic solutions, while engaging in the design thinking process. Makerspaces and design studios are different than classroom settings in that they offer more flexibility and resources for students to engage in the different stages of the design thinking process.

You Don’t Have to be 100% High Tech All the Time to Begin to Develop Technological Literacy

As noted before, many of the labor market projections indicate that the skills needed are rooted in technological, data and human literacies (Aoun, 2018). In order to develop these literacies, we are working to help our teachers find connections within their curriculum where students can engage in authentic problem solving using the design thinking process. Throughout this process we also believe it is important to engage students in what we call “skill building activities.”

We believe it is important to prepare students to be successful when engaging in design thinking by providing specific skill building learning opportunities that expose students to different technologies. The larger intention of these skill building activities is to provide students with an awareness and “tool-box” of certain technologies that can later inform a solution that a student could develop and test when engaging with a problem worth solving as it relates to his or her curriculum. Some examples include exposing students to the basics of coding and programming, robotics, 3D design and modification. In addition, we also believe that it is important to focus on some “low-tech” skill builders that prepare learners to be successful with rapid prototyping and ideation strategies.In addition to engaging students in the steps of the design thinking process, the piece that we have found to be helpful in this notion of skill building is heightening their basic technological literacy skills.

Another highly significant part of developing students’ technological literacy is to focus on developing computational thinking skills. In the simplest of terms, computational thinking allows students to better understand how to break down complex problems and devise step-by-step solutions. Not only is computational thinking leveraged when engaging in high-tech activities like coding, but it also is a crucial component of devising a variety of solutions. For example, specific computational thinking skills, or sometimes referred to as the “cornerstones of computational thinking,” are the same processes that people and machines use to complete a variety of tasks. If we can work to help improve student metacognition around these skills, the more likely they will know how to employ them efficiently and effectively.

One of the most powerful pieces of the design thinking process is the making and testing of prototypes. It is not sufficient enough for students just to develop a representation of their prototype solution and stop there. It is through the testing phase that students can actually further develop computational thinking skills, identify ways to improve their solution design. While not every solution a student develops will always be technological in nature, we aim to provide students with access to technology tools and systems that could inform a potential solution.

In order to present computational thinking to educators in “digestible bites” and to model computational skill development, activities we work with teachers and students to engage in “unplugged” computational thinking activities as well as use basic block coding programs to teach the initial problem-solving concepts that are necessary for testing solutions. These specific steps provide any learner (teacher or student) with the process needed for appropriately testing a solution. And yes, while this may inherently be done in math, science or engineering curriculum, we believe that it is highly relevant to help computational thinking become a part of learning that transcends traditional subject areas, because after all, there are a variety of industries and future employment opportunities that need our students to leverage computational thinking skills, even if in seemingly low-tech careers.

Connecting the Dots: College Career Readiness, Technological Literacy and Maker Culture

Think of the last time you said, “hey Siri,” “Alexa” or controlled something in your house from your smartphone. Or perhaps your car alerts you when you cross a lane line or assists you when parking. It is clear that over the past five years the way we live has greatly been impacted by the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart technologies. It also is clear that the careers we are preparing students for are going to be heavily impacted by smart and machine technologies, also referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Given the rapid accelerations of these technological changes, leaders in education must also consider the evolving role of humans in the workplace, and work to provide students with skill sets that help them to thrive. Moreover, as leaders we must develop the capacities of all educators to prepare students to be able to further develop the skills humans can do best and leverage machine technology for what it does best.

In our district, having a clear definition of maker learning and equitable access to maker resources, tools and technologies we are able to help all students to develop technological, data and human- centered literacies. Providing our educators with a clear vision and purpose to what maker learning looks like in our district and by modeling the type of student experiences that take place in our makerspaces and design studios we have been able to respond to the rapid rate of technological change that is taking place in the world. Upcoming articles will share the processes we’ve taken to develop teacher capacity around technological literacy and maker learning and how we are working to formally measure students’ technological literacy skills.

References

Aoun, J. (2018). Robot-proof: Higher education in the age of artificial intelligence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking creates new alternatives for business and society. New York: Collins Business.

Daugherty, P. R. (2018). Human Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI. Harvard Business Review Press.

Friedman, T. L. (2017). Thank you for being late: An optimist's guide to thriving in the age of accelerations. New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISTE Standards for STUDENTS. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.iste.org/standards/for-students

Wisconsin Standards for Information and Technology Literacy (2017). (2019, January 16). Retrieved from https://dpi.wi.gov/imt/it-literacy-standards