This award supports a workshop to be held in conjunction with the 2010 World Maker Faire being hosted at the New York Hall of Science. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together the Maker community with formal and informal science and mathematics learning experts.
The Maker movement is a recent phenomenon promoted by the Maker Media division of O'Reilly Media. There are currently three U.S. and one International Maker Faires, with attendance of about 30,000 each. The Faires consist of exhibits characterized as technology-rich and innovative and developed either by the exhibitor (Do-It-Yourself or DIY) or increasingly, as collaborative exhibits (Do-It-With-Others or DIWO). Participants visiting the Faires interact directly with the developer(s) and exhibits to learn the technology and engineering skills associated with designing and building their own products.
The New York Hall of Science workshop will be co-chaired by Tom Kalil, Associate Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, and Dale Dougherty, Founder of the Maker Faires. It will have approximately 50 participants drawn from academe, business, non-profits, and state, local and federal government. Workshop attendees will observe and participate in the Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science the day before the workshop. On the second day, attendees will then address the following questions: 1) How can the innovations of the Maker movement inform science and mathematics education?; 2) What collaborations between policy makers, education and learning science researchers, and the Maker Movement can best spur innovation in science and mathematics education?; 3) What funding opportunities are possible between the Maker community and the private, philanthropic, and government sectors for the support of transformative science and mathematics education and learning research? The workshop will result in a multimedia report that will propose answers to these questions. The report will inform the education and learning science research communities about opportunities for innovations in education and learning.
The workshop is designed to broadly inform both policy and practice in STEM Education. The Maker/DIY/DIWO movement is focused on design and engineering. These processes are important in STEM disciplines. In particular, the movement has motivated thousands of individuals to voluntarily participate in building technology-based projects in a manner similar to the open source software movement. If this motivation can be broadly harnessed, it could transform STEM education through new knowledge of STEM learning science and education research.
The broader impact of this workshop is situated in the large numbers of individuals already engaged in Maker/DIY/DIWO projects. If more STEM content can be married to these projects, then the impact to science learning and teaching could be substantial. Since many of the Maker Faire participants come from rural communities, there is an implicit promise that incorporating more STEM content into Faire projects could have the effect of broadening participation to an underrepresented community.
Overview and Broader Impact In collaboration with Dale Dougherty, general manager at O’Reilly Media and founder of the Maker Faire festivals and Tom Kalil, Deputy Director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, NYSCI approached the National Science Foundation to sponsor a two-day workshop to consider how the Maker movement can help stimulate innovation in formal and informal education. Workshop participants were asked to attend the Sunday Maker Faire to experience the event in all its excitement and complexity and to interact with Makers. On the following day, over 80 leaders in education, science, technology and the arts gathered at NYSCI to consider important ways in which the Maker movement can be leveraged to invigorate teaching and learning and to attract and inspire young people to engage in STEM fields. Participants included leaders from foundations and federal agencies, educators and developers from schools of engineering, architecture, computer science, and multimedia design, entrepreneurs whose life work has focused on "Making" in different sectors, innovators in the fields of formal and informal science education, research scientists in teaching and learning, and directors of leading science centers, museums and arts institutions. Findings that Address Intellectual Merit Recommendations fell into four categories: 1. Building the Making Infrastructure For Making to be infused into formal and informal learning environments, we need to support and invest in efforts that enable national "Maker" events to expand into local communities. Grow the Capacity of Maker Faire to Support Locally Defined Efforts. To enable the Maker movement to build alliances with education, we need to strengthen the capabilities and resources both of the Maker Faire enterprise and its informal learning colleagues, enabling Maker Faire and its partners to disseminate best practices and technical support to facilitate community-based activities. Develop a "Make for America Maker Corps" of Volunteers. To broaden the basis of support for Making in local communities, create a Maker Corps of master Makers with drive and passion who are available to work with groups in and out of schools. Create Better Tools for Sharing Maker Activity. There is a need for online tools and databases that make it easy to locate and share information about Making projects and topics. 2. Making and Teaching in Schools A major challenge in schools today is the issue of student engagement, particularly in the STEM subject areas. Teachers and schools need support in the forms of strategies, materials and administrative policies that enable them to experiment with moving STEM from "pushing" what students need to know, to "pulling" them into innovative and engaging content. Create Teacher Professional Development That Promotes Innovation. To promote innovation in teaching, we need to investigate how to engage and support teachers as Makers. Create 21st Century "Maker Schools." To reinvigorate STEM learning, we need to incorporate into both traditional academic high schools and vocational-career schools Maker programs where design is core to the STEM disciplines. Support the Growth and Adoption of Personal Fabrication Technologies as Pedagogical Tools for STEM Learning. We need to gain further insight into the value of using small-scale product design and manufacturing tools in science and engineering classrooms. 3. Making and Engaging Diverse Learners Maker-like projects enable young people to discover what they are good at, motivating them to pursue further opportunities in STEM-related fields. To increase the diversity of young people who get involved in STEM and become innovators in this new economy, we need to invest in initiatives in which student interests are nurtured and grown through stimulating interactions with people, places, objects and situations. Seed Young Maker Club Educational Initiatives. Many existing outreach programs integrate different levels of Making into their work with young people. We need to build deliberate partnerships with informal and formal learning organizations that help schools and communities host "young Maker workshops" or "clubs" grounded in service oriented work. Create A Network of Maker Spaces to Introduce STEM to Diverse Learners.Create Maker spaces to grow communities of practice around prototyping local ideas and products of interest to diverse groups of people that naturally draw on STEM and non-STEM disciplines. 4. Making and Assessment A key challenge in enabling the Maker movement to become integral to education is how to assess the learning that takes place. To move forward, we need policies that allow for alternative assessment measures to be adopted and used to document outcomes that result from engaging students in Maker-like activities. Identify and Create Authentic Performance-Based Assessment Methods That Capture Important Aspects of Making. We need to connect what Makers are doing to well-established bodies of learning research. Not the Same Old Metrics: Assessment of Affective Learning. To address the engagement gap that we see in our educational system, we need to apply existing measures for assessing enjoyment, engagement and motivation to the Making process.
