This essay examines the potential for the integration of a maker curriculum into modern classrooms.

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Making a Generation of Makers: The Potential for a Maker Curriculum
Colin G. Haines
Western Oregon University
March 22, 2018

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Making a Generation of Makers: The Potential for a Maker Curriculum
Word Count: 2767
The maker movement has been gaining ground in the twenty-first century but the
majority of ground that has been gained is independent of school classrooms as opposed to
within them. While a precious few teachers are actively attempting to integrate making and
constructionism into their curriculum, many in education view it as nothing but a passing fad and
others still would denigrate it as being solely within the realm of kindergarteners. One question
that is yet to be fully realized, let alone answered, is how would a maker curriculum stand up as a
supplement to, or replacement of, a standard high school curriculum?
To answer our primary question, we must first ask ourselves a more foundational
question: What does a maker curriculum look like and how does it currently work in our
schools? To begin with, one of the key tenets of a maker curriculum is that it presents “a shift in
education from passive to active learning” (Roscorla, 2013, para. 3). As opposed to sitting back
and passively being taught, maker students are actively learning through hands on experience;
they are either putting their prescribed lessons into action or learning on their own through trial
and error. Another key tenant of making is it yields a tangible product or, as Mitchel Resnick
puts it, “an external representation of ideas in your head” (2013, p. 50). Sometimes with
traditional pen and paper assignments, it can be difficult for a to student understand what went
right or wrong, but when that idea is physically manifested, those successes and errors are staring
them right in the face. Furthermore, being a maker who creates products changes a persons view
of themselves. Dale Dougherty (2012) believes that instead of being a consumer who is defined
by what they buy, a maker is defined by what they can make, do, and learn. The last key tenet of
making that will be covered here is that it is more about the process than the product. A failure

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can sometimes be a better learning experience than a success, as long as it can be incorporated
into future endeavors. Sometimes, it can be difficult to see where your English essay went awry,
but when the rotary car you are building does not run, that becomes a form of instant feedback
that beckons you to rectify it.
The maker curriculum is slowly working its way into schools as new teachers familiar
with its practices begin to enter the field. According to recent national surveys, around half of
the current teacher education programs in the United States provide teacher candidates with the
opportunity to learn about maker technologies and principles (Cohen, 2017). It is primarily
science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) teachers that are employing maker curricula
to their practice and this has been the case for some time now. Over the past decades, niche
pockets of STEM educators have been supplementing or supplanting their curriculum with
elements of making.
Early examples of a maker curriculum can be traced back to Seymour Papert and his
constructionist philosophy. In 1967, Papert created Logo, a programming language that enabled
students to learn math through creating computerized designs. Only a few years after its
creation, Logo was being used to completely replace the mathematics curriculum for a seventh
grade class in Lexington, MA. Much to the surprise of all but those directly involved, the
students’ math achievement scores had risen in spite of not doing anything that resembled typical
middle school math throughout the entire year (Harel & Papert, 1991). Papert attributed much of
the success of this and subsequent case studies to deep thinking and persistence in collaboration,
which are key tenets of maker education. Middle school math problems are momentary
undertakings; students quickly solve them and they are either right or wrong but either way they
are done. Niederhauser & Schrum (2016) describe the typical school math paradigm as

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involving “the explanation of a mathematical concept by the teacher (reinforced with information
from a textbook), worked examples to model solution procedures, guided practice with a
problem set, and independent practice with additional problem sets (homework)” (p. 358). In
contrast, when engaging in a long term maker project like a Logo design, students will persist
through obstacles, gather inspiration from what their peers are doing, and get new ideas to
implement, all while using math as a means to their end. This process of persistence,
collaboration, and revision is much more akin to how a professional level mathematician works
than a typical secondary school math class.
I have a similar account to Papert when it comes to maker education across a STEM
curriculum. I can recall an instance when I was teaching students 3D design and printing. In the
past, I had worked as a computer aided drafter and designer (CADD) in a machine shop and on
housing projects, so I could be called something of a subject matter expert who would be
difficult to impress. I was teaching students to use a program called Tinkercad and was walking
most of the students through the creation of some primitive designs but a few of the students had
insisted they were experienced, so I allowed them to work independently.
When I was satisfied that the students under my tutelage were getting the hang of the
program and were able to experiment on their own, I went to check on the students who had been
working independently and what I saw left my mouth agape. The designs these students had
created would have satisfied my former employers if I had created them in double the time. My
personal favorite was a piece of articulating torso armor. Granted the level of ease afforded by
current software tends to expedite the execution of designs, but these students’ ability to translate
an image into a 3D printable design in such a short amount of time was astounding. What
impressed me even more was the manner of thinking that had resulted in the design. The girl

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who had made the torso armor told me about how she had created the “perfect shoulder guard
curve” by using a circle with its radius at around mid chest and how she had made the “cool
vortex symbol” by using Fibonacci spirals. When I asked her how she knew all this math, she
responded by telling me that she needed to know these things so she could be a respected
designer in the Minecraft community. This girl had learned math and design skills far above an
elementary school level because she participated in maker activities like Minecraft in her free
time, and just as importantly, she was having fun doing it.
One of the main criticisms levied against the integration of maker curriculum into STEM
education is that the types of cases mentioned in Papert’s example, my own, and that of
contemporaries is that so much of the evidence in favor of maker education is comprised of small
case studies and subjective stories (Emihovich, 1990). Maker education is still outside of the
mainstream and most research has been done at the single classroom level or district level at the
largest. The lack of case studies and the size of those studies have caused many to question the
validity of the evidence in favor of maker curricula. Another criticism that tends to be imposed
against maker research is that much of it is done outside of the k12 education system in after
school or community based programs. These programs are difficult to assess because they are
not subject to the Common Core Standards as are other subjects. What this means is that
learning done in an external maker program will only be reflected as an improvement on
standardized testing in a traditional STEM class and not as a learning gain in and of itself.
The lack of substantive evidence and standardized testability creates a quandary for
administrators who would wish to implement large scale maker integration in a school or district:
the scarcity of “credible” and “testable” evidence in favor of maker curricula makes it unlikely
that it will be implemented, yet until it is implemented on a large scale, the evidence will remain

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scarce. One administrator that is attempting to integrate making across her school district is Pam
Moran, the superintendent of Albermarle County Public Schools in Virginia. Moran (as cited in
Thompson, 2014, p.35) has been pleased with the results of integrating maker curriculum, stating
that “when kids and teachers are given the chance to make, to create, all of the sudden you see
people becoming passionate about who they are as learners.” Within Moran’s school district,
administrators, teachers, parents, and students alike have all been generally pleased with the
integration of making into their schools. Moran does admit, however, that making does pose a
big problem because at present, its practices are superseded and undermined by the need for
teachers to teach material that is covered on their standardized tests. This creates a situation
where educators must be one foot in and one foot out in terms of problem based learning models
like the maker movement.
If maker projects could serve as proof of learning in place of standardized testing,
teachers interested in constructionism would be fully able to commit to embracing making as a
major portion of their curriculum. Unfortunately, this is simply not the case at the moment. The
bright spot on the horizon is that when universities make big changes, secondary schools tend to
follow suit. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the nations premier institutes of
higher learning, now accepts maker portfolios proof of learning under admissions criteria. With
universities embracing the maker movement as proof of learning, it stands to reason that it could
be implemented at lower levels in the near future.
Another major criticism against maker programs is that they tend to attract a
preponderance of affluent and “nerdy” white males (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014), who are a
group that has not traditionally struggled academically. To remedy this, works are currently
underway to bring Makerspaces into low-income communities and some forward thinking

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educators are already using maker activities to improve their local communities. Tan, Barton &
Schenkel (2018) are one such group who are putting together projects to bring making into low-
income communities and have compiled resources of several maker projects children have
completed that have helped their local communities. An example of one of these projects is a ten
year old boy named Samuel, who lives in a community that lacks streetlights and safe parks,
while being host to gang activity and long winters with short days. Samuel took these insights
about his community and used his local Makerspace to create a solution: a light up football that
would allow children in his neighborhood to safely play on streets with no streetlights. This is
just one example of how making can be just as transformative for low-income populations as
they have been for affluent ones.
When discussing large-scale maker curriculum integration, it becomes necessary to dispel
the common myth that making has no place in the humanities classroom since it falls outside of
their scope of practice. I have worked as both a teacher of the humanities and as an instructor in
a maker corps, yet even I had difficulties in trying to marry the two together. It is entirely too
easy to envision a miserly English teacher thinking to him or herself that the maker movement is
all about building robots and has nothing to do with English. To begin with, that teacher would
be wrong when one factors in the importance of concise communication when programming a
robot. Secondly, a robot is merely a product, it is the skills and learning required to make the
robot that are essential to a maker curriculum. Building a robot step by step from a prefabricated
kit does not make you a maker any more than following the instructions to make a paper machete
volcano makes you a scientist. Subjects like English and history have traditionally relied heavily
on book literacy, which pundits like Sven Birkerts (2006) suggest is waning in the twenty-first
century. With traditional book learning losing its appeal with American youth, other literacies

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like information literacy will become more prominent. Jane Lofton (2017) argues that maker
activities can be an important element of a humanities education since they help develop crucial
information literacy skills; recognizing the need for, accessing, evaluating, using, and integrating
information are all key elements of making.
It could surely be said that robots have little to do with English but it would be difficult to
argue that certain other maker processes hold no place in the humanities. Jonan Donaldson
suggested several activities that can be incorporated into an English class, including utilizing
“the wealth of creativity tools which were freely available online, including podcasting,
screencasting, online presentation, mindmapping, animation, and infographic tools” (2016, p. 2)
as opposed to simply writing essays all of the time. These tools are a far cry from the electronics
that many have come to associate with the maker movement, but they emphasize creation,
creativity, and collaboration and they can be readily applied to any liberal arts curriculum. If a
podcast or an infographic is not as firmly engrained with the essence of making as one might
like, then all it takes is a little more creativity to integrate making into a humanities curriculum.
For instance, a teacher may be giving a lesson on the history of Portland, Oregon. One idea
could be to assign different groups of students to different districts of the city to research. After
researching their designated district, the students could then be asked to create an augmented
reality (AR) overlay of their area so they could take their classmates on an AR tour of their
district.
An incredibly pragmatic reason to integrate maker curriculum into classrooms is that
maker technology is inextricably linked with future technology. Sylvia Martinez, one of the
vanguards of the maker movement, is quick to affirm this sentiment by stating, “some very smart
people are predicting that the tools and technology of the Maker Movement will revolutionize

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the way we produce, market, and sell goods and services worldwide” (Carnow & Martinez,
2013, p. 39). One of these so called “smart people” is futurist Paul Markillie. Markillie (as cited
in Franklin, 2017, p.124) predicts that by 2050, materials scientists will have completed a
“materials genome,” which will put the materials production industry into overdrive. This rise in
production will mean that materials production will be a growth industry for years to come and
there is no better way to prepare for a career in this sector than to have completed a maker based
curriculum throughout an academic career. Making will bleed into other future industries as
well. Makers will be needed to 3D print organs for the healthcare field. Makers will be needed
in the manufacture and implementation of new renewable and sustainable energy systems that
are certain to proliferate in the future. Biotechnology is another growth field that makers are
sure to populate. The list could go on, but the point is simply that the future is chalked full of
careers that thrive on principles of the maker movement, so it would be a good idea to educate
students in a manner that is compliant with that future.
It is difficult to answer the question of whether a maker curriculum could serve as a
supplement to, or replacement of, a standard high school curriculum. The answer at this time
would appear to be a subjective yes, but the lack of quantifiable data to compare the maker
movement against its traditional counterpart means that subjectivity is the way it can be
measured at present. In spite of the lack of data, is there still a chance that maker education and
constructionism will find their way into classrooms? Clearly this question must be answered in
the affirmative as we can already witness the seeds of making being sowed in our schools. It
seems that the maker movement is not destined to hit the classrooms in a sweeping movement
like No Child Left Behind, but rather to steadily trickle in over the years until it is firmly
engrained into our educational paradigm. The present and future states of our industry and

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economy dictate that making is a part of our culture and should soon be part of our educational
system.

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