Why making belongs in education

What making adds to learning

Knowing something and being able to do it should support each other. When learners build a robot, a digital tool, an artwork, a performance or a project for their community, their ideas start to have consequences. Parts work or fail. An audience reacts. Someone can ask them to explain what they did.

This idea comes from constructionism, a theory of learning that puts weight on making things other people can see and share[1]. It also draws on accounts of learning from experience, which link doing something, thinking about it, and using what was learned the next time[7].

A systematic review of makerspace research in schools finds the field well established rather than new[25]. A review across science and technology education finds that makerspaces help build creativity[24].

How making helps

Making also matters for learners who have decided they are not academic. It gives them another place to show what they can do. A learner who has been told for years that they are behind can build something that visibly works, in front of other people, and that old judgement no longer counts.

Research on inclusion finds that more people take part when participants are given real control over the work, and when ways of knowing from outside the classroom are valued[27].

What making needs to work

Activity alone is not enough, and this is where learning by making most often goes wrong. Research on where learning happens in maker settings is clear. It happens in the thinking and talking around the finished piece, not in the fact that something was built[4].

Three things have to be in place.

1. A clear purpose. The learner can say what the thing is for and how they would know if it worked. Project-based learning depends on a real question driving the work, not just on the activity being hands-on[11, 10].
2. The right amount of teaching. Beginners need to be taught. Holding teaching back so that they can “discover” things is a known way for learning to fail[17]. Guidance should be greatest where learners know least, and should ease off as the problems they take on become more open[15].
3. Time to try again, and an audience. Without a second attempt, nobody learns from the first. Without an audience, there is no reason for the second attempt to be better. Keeping a record of the work makes this visible, so that others can review it[21].

Technology should be chosen because it helps with these three things, not because it is new. A separate article makes that case.

The main argument against this approach

The strongest published criticism of approaches like this one is that leaving learners with little guidance does not work, especially for beginners. On this view, learning by solving problems only works once a learner already knows enough to solve them[17].

The criticism is largely right, and DreamSpace Academy does not treat “hands-on” as meaning “unguided”.

• At the Explorer stage, learners explore hands-on with a facilitator guiding them, not on their own.
• At the Maker stage, work follows a set brief, with taught content behind it.
• Open challenges come later, at stages where learners know enough to take them on.

Researchers disagree about when learners are ready for open work. The academy's answer is to match it to what each learner already knows, checked directly through the placement check.

What to ask of a programme

Do not ask only, “What will participants know?” Ask, “What will they be able to make, explain, test, improve and share?”

That question ties together what is taught, how sessions are run and how work is assessed. It also keeps the finished work where people can see and review it.

For the same reason, DreamSpace Academy writes its completion standard as six evidence states, the things a finished piece of work has to show, rather than as a list of topics covered. A topic list says what was taught. The question asks what the learner can now do.