Educational MakerSpace: A milestone in Education?

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Bora Bodur

ETEC 660 Introduction to Educational Computing

Educational MakerSpace: A milestone in Education?

Concordia University

2017

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ABSTRACT

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I am continiuing my education after a long pause of sixteen years in public schools working as a teacher.Computer technology and its use has advanced a lotsince my last campus experience as a student.Exploring and experimenting through computing related technology was a previlige to engineering departments when I was pursuing my bachelors degree in philology.Technological democratization has spread the use of latest and even experimental technologies to many departments, as an example, today the textile departments of universities are experimenting on wearable technology, the “wearables” that can communicate and transfer data among each other via latestlow-power wireless connectivity technologies.After my very first experience with a maker workshop in the lab of education makers in the Milieux Institute of Concordia University, I am captivated by the variety of application possibilities andexpanding horizons of makerspaces and pursued my interest on the maker movement related technology. In this paper I am writing abouttechnologies related to makerspace, development and contribution of maker culture toeducational makerspaces.

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Introduction

Since the very first appearance of the humankind on Earth’s surface we have been testing, experimenting and learning from each other. While gathering and tasting what to eat, successing or failing, using tools to hunt, building new ones to farm, learning construction techniques to build homes, developing utilities and inventing gadgets to survive, working and studying collaboratively.There have been many revolutionary points in history, milestones that affected the speed of this ?progress deeply.The use of technology is definitely not new in this progress. One of the major milestones in human history is the invention of writing which was first used when humans were emerging from hunter-gatherer groupsto settling ethnic communities and setting the rules and laws of life together. The first examples of writing appear in law to keep track of the new concept of “property”. Later writing emerged as a way of passing on the agricultural knowledge when certain details like seeding, pruning harvesting dates needs to be remembered. (Whipps, 2008). People used different forms of learning through sketching, note taking, describing and passing on their knowledge, culture and surroundings in a very permanent way in Mesopotamia, by 3000 B.C. (Almaguer, 2016).

Another milestone is the invention of the wheel. Humans became able to travel and first commerce has begun and spread to distant places which were unreachable before, bookkeeping of their property distributing related contracts all along. Soon enough writing became a privilege of the wealthy members of the societies as knowledge and bookkeeping became an element of survival for the civilizations. This led writing and literacy to become a very specialized profession among the members of the elite class. Another major milestone was the invention of the printing press. Printing enabled the accessibility of the once privileged knowledge. Mass distribution of knowledge outsourced the privileges of the male members of the elite class and literacy became common. In the 16th century first public schools appeared. The practice of universal, compulsory public education developed gradually with the industry. (Mulhern, 1959)

???????????The internet; the digital revolution, the public release of the network, the borders and barriers became transparent, mass distribution of knowlegde advanced again and the connectivity of the humankind improved drastically with this major milestone. Virtual communities in social networks have arised, as in a recent example, “over 350,000 tweets per minute, 500 million tweets per day and around 200 billion tweets per year” are sent among online people. (internetlivestats) People found various ways to learn and share their experience, knowledge and skills among themselves and across the World Wide Web. (Siemens, 2005; Downes,?2010)

Standards for learning and expected competencies of students have changed with the release of ?internet and the spread of personal computers, students learning how to use this technology in 90’s evolved to students using the technology to learn in the millennium, and now, “students must be prepared to thrive in a constantly evolving technological landscape” (ISDE, 2016).??

However, the digital revolution has resulted in a different type of change in learning and a new gap in human needs. In particular, the use of digital communication and the growth of the economy of services and intangible production has led to an evolving need to reinstal tangible productivity and independence in creation of tangible goods through technology.

Evolution of ?Makerspaces

In search of a new way of STEM (Science, Tchnology, Engineering and Mathematics) education, researchers of Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea invented a digital electronic board which might have taken its name, Arduino,?from a local pub in Italy in 2005. The main advantage of this digital board is its simplicity, ease of use, and compability with other components to more complex units with more functions, resembling the building blocks of lego.

One important fuel to the growth of the maker culture is the?the launch of the Make magazine by Dale Dougherty in January 2005. The Arduino platform became more popular with the DIY (Do It Yourself) and DIWO (Do It With Others communities and spread to an audience of artists, designers, students, tinkerers, and the makers of things, the DIY culture evolved and spread as the maker movement.

The Arduino’s microcontroller is known as an AVR chip which is slow, and obsolete in modern technological terms, running on 16Mhz bandwidth with a single 8-bit core, and has a 32 kilobytes of storage and 2 kilobytes of RAM. However, its success suggests that it is not the technological advenacement, but the ease with which individuals can adopt the technology that drives its growth.?The ease of coding enabled the design students with no prior background in software or computer hardware to create and develop new projects. The Arduino board is designed with an open source code, based on old school BASICx24, ATOM and PICAXE; and has its own development environment (processing.org) that one can use to write, edit, compile, and upload your Arduino source code to help in the interface. It enables productions of boards from scratch, improve the current ones and create new versions.?As a result of the flexibility, simplicity, and wide use of Arduino boards, major producers and suppliers introduced compatible components that further fueled the diffusion of this new technology product. This amusing outcome also addressed an issue, seeing new technologies as a cure (Harris 2012), and proves that it is not always the solution. There is a tendency to throw money on new technologies to solve a problem. But the nature of “user identity” is completely different. There is not a single way of understanding. Even the slightest changes cancompletely alter behavior patternsand can not be taken as granted.(Lanier, 2011). Through their history on earth, humans have developed?tools and?algorithms with a cultural perspective and as a reflection of their own understanding of the world and?to comprehend or represent these inventions completely is probably impossible. (Elkerdi 2013)

A second development that fueled the maker movement is the 3D printing technology.?Therevolutionary technology was created by Charles W. Hull in 1984 at 3D systems Corporation. 3D printing, also known as additive manifacturing or rapid prototyping, has been around for more than two decades as an expensive technology until the introduction of the personal 3D printer with an open source code.A printer that can even print a duplicate of itself, at a diminishing cost,?introduced a broad capability of creation and production possibilities. It had a similar impact as the Arduino platform on education, abide its technology is still in the development process, 3D printers are very practical in making STEM or STEAM (with Arts involved) education fun by making various abstract concepts and technology visible. (Peels, 2017) The devices we use every day are usually under commercial wraps, covers and enclosures and this makes it really difficult to figure out how they work; such as the touchscreen tablet, the smartphone, or the gearbox of our cars. Thus a working 3D printer even itself makes the observation easier and the concept?visible, plus introducing the 3D software to learners, designing an object in it, transferring, slicing and printing it makes them familiar to the interaction of the common technologies with each other;?how things work together;software, hardware, codes and interfaces.

Enabling anyone with access to a 3D printer to rapidly prototype and manufacture their ideas inexpensively, 3D printing has been introduced to certain educational sectors as a democratized design process. In medicine and anatomy, design and engineering, the students could witness their designs and other concepts they are working on that came into life as physical objects where they can touch and observe the details as print-outs.?And for the teachers, their learning materials including their lab objects could be printed right away wherever and whenever they are absent or broken. Their student's knowledge retention rates could be increased drasticallyby the ability to trace the changes they make to the design(Peak Performance Center).?The hands-on printing activity creates excitement and promotes critical thinking and innovation.?For a geography class, as a beneficiary example; helping students to print their own countries of interest as an assignment, where students could bring these countries together to build a 3D map of Europe as a constant learning aid. Or in a maths class, explaining the complex parabola manipulative (youtube1) with a 3D printed model can be pretty helpful to teachers describing this abstract of this sophisticated math concept and many others.

An example of the institutional acceptance of such technology in education can be observed in the U.K.?The Department of Education of UK funded a trial to explore the potential use of 3D printers in STEM education between 2012 and 2013 (DfE, 2013). Twenty one schools participated in a pilot project that formally introduced 3D printers in the curriculum. A resulting report indicated a higher levels of student motivation and involvement in science and mathematics. The essential question, as the report also reveals, is how to turn 3D printers into a teaching and learning source.?Nevertheless, the U.K. government has allocated funding to conitue the experiment in 60 other schools. (Park, 2013)?Currently, all of the schools that benefit from the funding are active partners of their own design network.

As every technology application, 3D printers have their own challenges in implementation. Department of Education has revealed that teachers have to spend 2-3 months at least to become familiar enough with the technology to facilitate their lessons successfully with confidence. The trial also revealed the success of the schools that could implement the technology comes from the encouragement and financial support of the senior managers who also built technically strong and talented teams to transfer the knowledge in need. Although the 3D printers have decreased to a very affordable price, they need to be accessible to students and kept in view,?maintaining and sustaining the facilitation of the equipment could be struggling for some schools without further government funding even though they were to be supplied with the 3D printers. Due to the trial report mentioned above, some of the schools were reported to keep the printers locked in staff rooms or moved away after use. Which could pose an accessibility issue; both for teachers and students using the technology.

One good example of a succesful application of 3D printing in education is The Digital Girl of The Year?Competition in 2016. 14 years old Amy Mather, a schoolgirl from Manchester won the prize and became the first European Digital Girl. She was first introduced to coding at the age of 11, at Manchester Science Festival. Through her interest in the digital maker movement, she used her coding experience to make a flat version of a stool in a 3D design software and cut the pieces of her design in laser CNC in the Fab Lab she attended in Manchester.

Preparing for students success

With the impact of the digital revolution, technology is embedded into our lives,?both schools and campus networks are accommodating many types of operating systems and devices built within them. The competency and the role of both the teacher and the learner have changed.?Learners are expected to develop oral and written communications skills, critical thinking and problem-solving skills, establish teams and take part in teams, be active in collaboration,?and be able to use new technologies as requirements of the 21st century. They should also be ready to take an active role in choosing, achieving and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, be aware of their rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in harmony in an interconnected digital world. (ISTE, 2016; DQ, 2017)

DQ Institute defined digital intelligenceas “a sum of social, emotional, and cognitive abilities that enable individuals toface the challenges and adapt to the demands of digital life” including three broad areas: citizenship, creativity, and entrepreneurshipand developed an educational program to establish the merits of digital citizenship for young children aged 8 – 12 (DQ, 2017).The DQ Institute believes there is an urgent need to prepare them for the digital world when the mentioned age group actively start engaging in digital media and devices as it is a critical age range when children become active on social media and are exposed to cyber risks.Figure 1 is the graphical demonstration of their digital citizenship identification below;

Figure 1. DQ Citizenship

International Society for Technology in Education, ISDE, with a similar approach with the same goal have identified three areas to apply their standarts; students, educators and administrators.

In USA, the value of consistent real-world learning goals are recognized by state school chiefs and governors, an effort named “Common Core State Standards Initiative” has been launched to ensure all students, regardless of where they live, are graduating high school prepared for college, career, and life. (CSSO, 2010)

Teachers are expected to be learner-centred,?providing personalized instructions, being adaptive to their learner’s needs and supportive to knowledge exchange using information and communication technologies in a collaborative environment and increase interaction between their learners. (Laurillard, 2013) Educational makerspaces may have a potential to provide a bridge between the technology, learners and educators.

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A working hybrit?

Wireless, portable, mobile, handheld devices and social media networks also have a deep impact on education in general, the importance of customizing a learning program to fit personal and individual learning preferences has increased with this mobility and connectivity. E-learning and mobile learning is evolving and growing rapidly with the new trend of microlearning-micro lecture elements. (Wen& Zhang. 2015) The micro-lecture format is first introduced by David Penrose with his claim of “tiny bursts of information can teach just as well as traditional lectures when paired with assignments and discussions.” (Wen& Zhang. 2015) The reason I’m mentioning this format of learning on this paper is to reveal the correlation between makers use of GitHub, a “social coding” network, SketchFab for design and modelling needs or online social media networks like ?YouTube as micro-learning or goal-based learning tools for their projects and Penrose’s bite-size design which encourages a self-directed model of learning that allows his students to select lessons to watch or stop, play, replay and?read, move among them at their own pace. ?“Knowledge building is a group activity in which knowledge is intentionally developed and students collaboratively work to solve, discuss, and compare common problems and detail their ideas (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003; 2006), These activities are bound and blend?with each other and there is no single solution, method or theory that can be taken granted. A makerspace is usually in need of a supportive environment, mostly an inspiring social atmosphere that stirs curiosity and through curiosityit triggers attraction, fun, cooperation,?and playfulness. Which reminds me of the projects of “Prof. Zihni Sinir” a character from the cartoon series of the famous Turkish caricaturist ?rfan Sayar. He started drawing his awkwardly amusing projects in GIRGIR magazine in 1977. His ideas in those projects found their way into real life through his followers and his transformed projects ?have been published under Bilim ve Teknik, the monthly publication of The Scientific And Technological Research Council Of Turkey and now they are taught, produced, developed, transformed by a makerspace dedicated to his works in ?zmir (zihnisinir.com).

Students usually follow their curiosity.?It is not hard to say that makerspaces are a story of success by means of opportunities they provide for informal learning. It can also increase student performance by naturally supporting innovation through critical and creative thinking. Educational makerspaces are growing in numbers. As mentioned by Nicole Lou and Katie Peek, the number of makerspaces have multiplied over the last ten years. Shown on the chart below;

Figure 2. Number of makerspaces worldwide

Conclusion

Educational makerspaces are very likely to continue growing as an inclusive trend being based on constructivism as it stresses the importance of tools, media, and context in human development, and the processes by which individuals come to make sense of their experience and envision a better world through technology fluency and integration. (Ackermann, 2001)

As it is suggested that we need to prepare new generations to a world that requires innovators,?using design thinking as a way to teach and develop complex skills of creativity, educational makerspaces can be the solution(Wagner & Compton, 2012)and it can be considered as an important milestone in education.

Enabling design thinking, promoting media literacy, inclusive with micro-learning and connectivity, having both collaborative and personalized learning elements, educational makerspaces could be accepted as a solid way to anticipate the constant and rapid changes of the digital era.

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