Week 9 Discussion

The study Parents as Learning Partners in the Development of Technological Fluency resonated strongly with me, as I also grew up with a technology-minded father but was never exposed to CS until college. Throughout my brother and I’s childhood, my dad would spend time teaching my brother programming and web design basics. In an interesting turn of events I ended up majoring in Computer Science and my brother is now a musician.

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.