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For all the excitement, though, there are also hurdles. One of the biggest: "Maker education" itself is a highly squishy concept. In general, the term refers to hands-on activities that support academic learning and promote experimentation, collaboration, and a can-do mindset. But in practice, educators use "making" to describe everything from formal STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) curricula to project-based classroom lessons to bins of crafting materials on a shelf in the library.

Should making happen primarily in a dedicated space or inside every classroom? And is the purpose of maker education to help students better learn the established curriculum or to upend traditional notions of what counts as real learning?

The whole point of maker education, Turner said, is to find new ways to engage students, especially those who have struggled to find a comfortable place inside school. It's a belief increasingly borne out by research. Academics have consistently found that making "gives kids agency" over their learning in ways that traditional classes often don't, said Erica Halverson, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There's also mounting evidence that making is a good way to teach academic content. "The fear out there is that schools have to choose between making and academic work, but empirically that turns out not to be true," Halverson said.

A Maker is an individual who communicates, collaborates, tinkers, fixes, breaks, rebuilds, and constructs projects for the world around him or her.

Great projects, on the other hand, are opportunities for learners and teachers to collaborate with those around them.

Making loves the process and allows the teacher to move fluidly between levels and subjects. When I designed a middle school level Forces and Motion unit, NGSS MS-PS2 dovetails nicely with CCSS Mathmatical Practice.

Existing inequities play out when adults engage with kids around tinkering or making. And, while makerspaces are a unique kind of learning space, many of the techniques thoughtful educators are using to improve their interactions with students could be used in other venues.

Sewing has been one of the most successful projects in the program Escudé helps run at the Boys and Girls Club in San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley neighborhood. Kids shared their family histories of sewing and even invited grandparents to participate and share. The activity was framed as intellectual thought and valued as equal to any other tinkering task. The success of this activity came from giving students the space to share themselves and build relationships with one another and the facilitators, not because they were using the most recent technology or because they were building robots.

it’s a cultural assumption that kids would think taking apart toys would be fun.