I loved reading about the maker movement and the digital fabrication paper. I can see how these methods of learning would probably really engage students and gear their education towards real world action and problem-solving.

However, I have a few questions about it. Coming from a place where the best schools in the country have around 50 kids in a class and the worst don’t even have proper teachers, I can see how these movements can remain inaccessible to a large part of the world’s population. Given this, won’t this just lead to greater educational equity and lead to the further mystifying of technology for some parts of the world?

Additionally, I’m not sure how I feel about “the activity, which was originally a history project, becoming a sophisticated mathematics project. ” The reverse is hardly ever true and never encouraged to be true as a result of any movement. If as a society we start valuing “making”, “creating” and “innovating”, where will the traditional humanities which lay emphasis on thinking and analyzing fall? Given there already diminishing importance won’t this just lead to further issues?

In this particular example, it seemed as if the class learnt the actual history aspect of i.e. the architectural features of the various monuments pretty quickly and spent majority of the time designing and building it. That sounds like engineering/architecture with a bit of history thrown in to me.

Despite this disparity, I think I still gained a lot of value out of having a technology-minded parent because I was able to observe and model his behaviors towards technology. When I did express initiated interest in engineering and computer science later, his role shifted to that of a resource provider (driving) and encouragement to continue pursuing my interest. The study did leave me wondering how much sooner I could have pursued computer science and what societal factors lead parents to be more inclined to introduce boys to technology.

The article Digital Fabrication and ‘Making’ in Education: The Democratization of Invention also made me curious to know more about how people develop “maker” identities, and how strongly this impacts first-time users of a makerspace.

My main takeaway from my visit to Barron Park was that the teacher is the key component of a successful maker space. Ms. Kolhatkar has identified the needs of her students and develops projects that will interest them, not always necessarily using the flashiest and newest technology. The Margolis, Goode, and Chapman article mentions that the “secret sauce” of success is “passionate, creative teachers who are interested in the problem solving of computer science, with a variety of secondary subject credentials.” The issue of access to these teachers is vital to the success of the Maker Space movement.

Most of the children interviewed in the Barron, Martin, Takeuchi, and Fithian don’t even need to make it to school to learn about computer science–they have parents that are well-connected in the technology industry. For instance, we have stories of Alex’s father expressing his colleagues’ interest in reviewing his son’s code or the parent who paid his daughter $25 to debug his software. Only in the wealthy enclaves of Silicon Valley could these kind of experiences be viewed as a possibility.

What about all the other kids? How can the fantastic learning opportunities of students with fantastic maker space instructors and tech savvy parents be made available across the economic spectrum? I saw that Marc also posted this excellent video: https://vimeo.com/110616469. Leah Buechley’s talk really gets at the heart of the issue–it is up to the Maker Movement’s leaders (who are mainly teachers themselves) to expand access. Perhaps its an unfair burden to ask of overtaxed educators, but without a true step towards equality in representation, the Maker Movement will fail precisely because of its success with wealthy engineers. This group has effectively blocked others from joining.

]]> https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/week-9-response-3/feed/ 0 https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/i-didnt-know-what-engineering-was/ https://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/i-didnt-know-what-engineering-was/#respond Thu, 03 Mar 2016 05:46:10 +0000 http://ed342.gse.stanford.edu/?p=1587 When I was in high school I had a vague idea of what an engineer did. They built things. Usually with their hands I thought. Bridges and buildings and stuff. I didn’t think I wanted to be an engineer. I wanted to be a math major. My best friend wanted to be a chemistry major. Looking back now I wonder how two people with a passion for Math and Science did not explore the possibility of pursuing the E or T in STEM. Now at a place like Stanford I can’t imagine not understanding how much the world requires engineers and computer scientists. And yet, I didn’t think that way not too long ago. It is amazing to me the lack of exposure I had to engineering and that it took me an entire year to enroll in a Computer Science class at Stanford (only to realize how much I loved it). I think that my Stanford experience would have been very different if I had exposure to computer science and engineering in high school. I think the state of our world requires early access to computer science. I think students, regardless of socio-economic background, should walk into college with at least a minor understanding of what programming is. I know I wish I did.

That being said, there is always the danger that the pendulum will swing too far in the maker direction and abandon the practice of having its roots in theory. One of the major issues of this class has been how to ground the staggering amount of “making” that is going on in the educational technology space right now in theory. I think that there is a nontrivial danger that if schools start to over emphasize making it will be to the detriment of theory based approaches to solution.

One aspect that the article brought up was finding metrics to measure success. It made me realize that when it comes to equity you have to not only find create a program that works but also find out to how to measure the effectiveness.

A question I had while reading, though, was if there were programs simlar to this but focused on different subjects such as history or psychology. Would a program such as ECS pigeon hold disadvantaged students into CS since no such programs exist for other subjects?

Some educators are beginning to incorporate principals of the Maker Movement in schools and believe in “the maker movement’s potential to transform how and what people learn in STEM.” Hands-on learning is a very popular way to engage students in activities. However, most schools do not have great reputations for creating truly engaging hands-on learning experiences. Instead, I believe, schools tend to draw boundaries and organize inauthentic experiences. Will schools be able to avoid drawing boundaries? If schools are to implement the Maker Movement, what will they need to consider while implementing? How will schools avoid watering down the experiences?

The lack of encouragement and development girls receive around STEM at a young age is incredibly disheartening. I think we are moving towards attempting to create tools to give girls access to STEM. Tools like GoldieBlox are incredibly exciting. However, I believe the true problem is cultural and subconscious. How do we change the ways parents approach girls and science? I think everyone wants their children to succeed but I do think that there are perceptions around how to raise girls that need to change. I wonder how we can make that change possible. I wonder if it must be through awareness and assuring that parents take a very active approach in assuring that they are motivating a girl to pursue STEM as much as they would a boy.