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The maker movement is encouraging entrepreneurs to share ideas, and the city is the central place where it lives, breathes, and succeeds.

Makers draw production back into the cities where consumption occurs, which can have profound economic and social benefits.

The untapped skills and knowledge unleashed in a makerspace now have the potential to become part of the creative economy of the city as a whole.

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.

I find that students really benefit from being given guidelines and then making something within those guidelines.

Find a way to have students reflect on what they’ve created and document it.

I recently created a design process worksheet that I’ve started using with my students.  They write a few brief sentences or draw some sketches for each step of the design process.

Working through guided projects can help students to develop the skills that they need to further explore creatively.  It’s true that some students can just figure it out, but most need that gentle push to get them started.

Following patterns to the letter when I first got started helped me to learn the skills that I needed to be creative in my knitting.

The problem comes when all we ever do are guided projects.  Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager warn against the “20 identical birdhouses” style class projects, where there is zero creativity involved.  It’s very easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much on standards, rubrics and guided projects and zapping all the fun and creativity out, turning a makerspace into nothing more than another classroom.  It’s tempting for many educators to just print out a list of instructions, sit students down in front of a “maker kit” and check their e-mail while students work through the steps one by one.  This is obviously not what we want in our makerspaces.

In this project, the entire 6th grade learned about geometry, unit rate, expenses and revenue by designing and creating their own paper lanterns. At the same time, students explored various cultures around the world through the lens of important global issues. Their final product was an original paper lantern that was to be part of an auction to raise awareness and funds for a community improvement project of their choice through the non-profit organization, Lantern Projects. The exhibition took place at Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park.

Making matters. And design thinking matters to makers.

Eleven students, including four who had just graduated eighth grade, would spend the weekend explaining how design thinking drove our program’s work and their learning. Kids used student-built prototypes to explain how they employed design thinking to solve problems and make the world a better place.

We set up stations where Faire attendees got to experience prototyping for themselves, tackling design challenges based on the Extraordinaires Design Studio and expertly explained by our kids.

The Turtle Art project, and the concept of “doing” or “making” before any explicit instruction has been given, is part of the school’s attempt to shake up its teaching. Lighthouse Community Charter has to cover the same standard curriculum as district schools, so teachers have to choose carefully the times when they’ll spend a little more time and creativity on a difficult subject.

“The concept of the coaching is that if we help someone with one or two projects, they may do more on their own.”

“I would much rather push for this kind of curriculum in schools serving low-income communities than in other schools because I think it will help students to gain their own voice, and a lot of the kind of character-building aspects that are intrinsic in this, but also to be exposed to new possibilities for the future,” Vanderwerff said.

So according to our "big tent" model of PBL, some of the newer "X-BLs" -- problem-, challenge- and design-based -- are basically modern versions of the same concept.

At BIE, we see project-based learning as a broad category which, as long as there is an extended "project" at the heart of it, could take several forms or be a combination of: Designing and/or creating a tangible product, performance or event Solving a real-world problem (may be simulated or fully authentic) Investigating a topic or issue to develop an answer to an open-ended question

We decided to call problem-based learning a subset of project-based learning -- that is, one of the ways a teacher could frame a project is "to solve a problem."

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.

1. Equity and diversity will not happen by accident

3. Projects should not be limited to classrooms

This idea of blending Maker opportunities with real-life activities has a strong supporter in Davis, who believes that it helps to show students the purpose of what they are doing.