Swinging the opposite direction

I think that the Maker movmenet has great potential to revolutionize the way in which we teach science and engineering. I really interesting expression of it’s absence in highschools right now is the number of Freshman who come into Stanford every year saying they want to be physics majors. In highschools, often the closest thing to an engineering type class that students are exposed to is physics. Students who enjoy the engineering/making of the physics classroom associate that mindset and process with physics and are quickly disillusioned upon taking intro physics classes in college which are largely theory based and whose labs end up being much dryer than those they experienced in highschool.

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.