Maker spaces are generally regarded as a valuable innovation in comparison to traditional education, although it is largely unclear what is exactly learned. This deficiency hampers the deployment of maker spaces, particularly their embedding and integration in the existing practice in formal education. In the work presented here, we explore the possibility of having learners self-report on their learning experience. For this purpose, we developed an easy-to-use visual tool for assessing learning of 21st Century Skills in children’s maker space activities, the Self-Evaluation Tool (SET). Particularly, we investigated the validation of the SET for the self-evaluation of learning activities in the maker space and how children evaluate their own performance in the various domains. The results show higher scores on learning goals in subjectification and lower scores for socialization. Future research will focus on a comparison of the different types of maker programs.
Maker education offers opportunities to stimulate the creativity of young people in various types of education. How to guide these learning processes, however, is an unexplored area for the supervisors (teachers and librarians). In the research-project presented, a professional learning community of librarians, teacher-researchers and maker educators investigates the pedagogy of ‘making’. The learning community consisted of twelve makerspace-coaches, three maker educators and three researchers. The interventions for enhancing creativity that were developed varied from redesign of the tasks to new forms of guiding students. It was noticed that the children came up with new ideas and were motivated to push out their frontiers. Furthermore, the coaches experienced that children’s creativity is not always visible in the final products of their making process, but rather in the process of making. The learning community turned out to be a fruitful approach for professionalization of makerspace-coaches.
MULTIFILE
