Glossary

Changemaker Journey

The path learners follow in the STEAM programmes. It has four stages, Explorer, Maker, Innovator and Changemaker, and each one describes what a learner’s making is for. It runs across every subject in the STEAM programmes rather than inside one of them.

It describes purpose, not skill level. Learners are never ranked on it, and the stages are not scored against one another.

The Changemaker Journey

Stage

One of the four positions on the Changemaker Journey. Each stage answers the question what is this work for. A learner enters a stage by meeting its conditions, not on a timetable.

Stages have names, never numbers. A number would turn a description of purpose into a ranking of people.

What each stage is for

Explorer

The first stage, “What can I do?” Learners try out tools, materials and ideas and meet other people, with no pressure to produce anything. Anyone can start: a person walks in.

Explorer work is never assessed. It is open, hands-on exploration led by curiosity, not a set task. Unassessed does not mean unsupported: facilitators keep it safe, answer questions and give feedback when it is wanted, and none of that counts toward a certificate. Assessing exploration would stop people exploring.

What each stage is for Published sources[5]

Maker

The second stage, “Can I make something?” Focused practice in one chosen subject, through assessed projects, until the learner can do the work reliably.

The only stage that has levels. The completion standard and certificates start here.

What each stage is for

Innovator

The third stage, “Can I make it better?” The learner uses skills from one or more subjects to look into a real problem and test different ways of solving it.

A technically excellent build that did not start from a community problem, and has not been tested by a real user outside the project team, leaves its maker an Innovator. That is a complete place to finish, not a failure to move on.

What each stage is for

Changemaker

The fourth stage, “Can I make a difference?” A learner reaches it by producing a grassroots innovation, not by time spent, enthusiasm or finishing a course.

Elsewhere in social innovation the word is used much more broadly: a changemaker is anyone who takes creative action for the greater good, with no invention and no made object needed. The meaning here is narrower, because a definition that includes everyone cannot be counted. Any figure on this site about changemakers uses this definition, not the wider one.

Definitional review → ,Who counts as a Changemaker Published sources[38]

Changemaker Candidate

Someone who has joined the venture pathway because they have shown intent and commitment, but who has not yet produced a grassroots innovation. A candidate becomes a Changemaker by producing one.

The conversion rate is the number of Changemakers divided by the number of candidates. Publishing a count of candidates as if it were a count of Changemakers would be the easiest way to overstate the results, and it is not done here.

The metric that matters

Level

How far into one subject a course goes. Each level has three parts, and all three are required: a description of what the learner can do, an expected number of learning hours, and a piece of work that can be assessed.

A level never describes a person. “Robotics Systems Level 3” is a course; “a Level 3 person” does not exist, because one number cannot describe a whole learner without losing most of the picture.

What a level is

Level count

How many levels a subject has. The number comes from the real steps in skill between a beginner and someone who can work independently. It is never chosen to match another subject or to fill a table.

Where no levels have been written for a subject yet, the entry says so. Putting a number there would suggest that a placement check, an exit condition and an assessed piece of work exist when they have not been written.

How a level count is derived ,What a level means

The four growth axes

Depth, Independence, Complexity, Impact: the four ways in which one level is harder than the level below it.

They make “harder” something that can be checked. A level that has moved on none of them is not a new level, just the same work with a bigger number.

What a level is

Unit

A block of work inside a single course, for example “Level 1, Unit 2 of 4”. Units organise the teaching; they do not come with a certificate of their own.

Different from a Starter Unit, which is a whole makerspace site.

Course specification

Programme

A planned, ongoing line of work with its own aims, which runs many courses, sessions or events. The in-school programme and the STEAM programmes are both programmes.

Programmes and domains

Course

What a learner enrols in and is certified for: one subject at one level, with published prerequisites, learning outcomes, units and assessed work. A level belongs to a course, never to a person.

What every course publishes

Cohort

One group of people who start and finish a course or bootcamp together.

Domain

Also written Subject

An area of learning and practice, such as software or creative arts, in which someone can build skill. The published list names the domains offered now or being developed. It is not a closed list: domains may be added, combined or retired.

Pages for learners often say subject for the same thing. Faculty and department are not used: a domain is something a learner progresses through, not a division of the organisation.

Which domains are offered now

Floor

An older word for an area of practice such as electromechanics, software, media or music. It named part of one building, so it has been replaced by lab: the people, skills and equipment of one practice, which can work in more than one place.

Domains and labs are different things, not two names for one thing: a domain is what a learner learns; a lab is the people, craft and equipment they practise it with, wherever that happens. They overlap freely, and several domains have no lab of their own.

How labs differ from domains

Maker profile

A learner’s record of how far they have gone in each subject (say, robotics at level 4, music at level 1, plus stage milestones), kept side by side rather than averaged.

There is no “overall level”. The profile is the record, and a single rank would throw most of it away.

The maker profile

Milestone

A checkpoint that is recorded but never graded, inside the Innovator and Changemaker stages: a field test completed, a user trial run, a community agreement reached.

Milestones take the place of levels after the Maker stage. From there the useful question is no longer “how deep” but “did it work, and for whom”.

Milestones

Placement check

The check at the start of a course that shows whether a learner already has what the course requires, however and wherever they learned it.

It looks at what the learner can actually do, instead of using age, school year or past courses as a stand-in for readiness. Prior learning counts whether it came from school, work, the internet, or a relative who repairs things.

How placement works ,Placement instead of age

Leaver

Someone who stops before the end of a stage or course. Leavers, and where they went next, are meant to be recorded as carefully as the people who finish. That record is not yet in place.

Leaving early is a route of its own, not a gap in the record. A programme that only records the people who finished has described its best cases and called it a result.

Where learners go next

The open outcome field

Where people go after the academy’s education: an open set of destinations rather than a fixed list. Documented routes include building a venture, research and academia, activism and community leadership, employment and freelancing, staying to work for the academy itself for a period (Grow Your Own), and leaving, which is the least understood route of all.

No total is published. A count would make a list of documented examples look complete, and would turn routes into ranks. Only the venture route leads to the DreamSpace Lifecycle; the other routes are not failures of it.

Where people go

Facilitator

Someone who guides a group to work things out for itself: to reach its own insights, solve problems or make decisions. A facilitator is a process expert, and a trainer is the content expert; one person can be both. In a lab the facilitator role rotates rather than being a permanent post.

A facilitator is the right role when it matters more that the group owns the result than that a set curriculum is covered: framing a local problem, planning, generating ideas, working through disagreement or making a shared decision. Facilitators still teach. They teach, coach, design with learners and learn alongside them, often within the same hour. What is avoided is the picture of a class at a tuition centre, along with the words lecturer and instructor that bring it with them.

What a trainer and facilitator do

Session roles: organiser, trainer, coach

Three separate jobs in running a session: the organiser sets the challenge and its context, the trainer (the published source calls this role the teacher) is responsible for the content, and the coach works with the learner on their own work.

One person often does all three. Naming them separately makes it easier to see when one of them is not being done.

What a trainer and facilitator do Published sources[14]

Mentor

Someone paired with one person over a longer period, rather than tied to a place or a session. Mentoring is the usual form of support on the venture pathway.

Taught instruction

Structured teaching that follows a syllabus, adapted to learning by making. It is one of the two ways sessions run, and it carries as much weight as the other.

Guidance is highest where knowledge is lowest. The strongest published criticism of discovery-led teaching is that beginners given little guidance do not learn well, and this way of teaching answers it directly.

Definitional review → ,Taught instruction and open making Published sources[17]

Open making

Free time with the tools, where learners choose what to work on and learn from each other. It is not assessed by default (a learner may later submit something made here as course evidence if it meets the criteria), and it has its own place in the timetable rather than being left to spare time.

Taught instruction and open making both run at every stage, in a mix that changes over time. Neither belongs to one stage.

Definitional review → ,Taught instruction and open making Published sources[26]

Guided project work

The usual way work is set at the Maker stage: the facilitator gives a brief with step-by-step support, and the learner finds the solution. The method is set; the outcome is open.

The room for different solutions grows as the support is reduced, and only in that order: a first workshop is tightly defined, and later ones give more room with less help.

How teaching is sequenced Published sources[15]

Project-based learning

Also written PBL

Learning through a long piece of work on one driving question, which ends in something made. It is the usual approach at the Innovator stage, and it is the only thing the abbreviation PBL means on this site.

Problem-based learning is a separate tradition with a different history and structure, and it is not part of this approach. The two are not interchangeable and do not share the abbreviation.

Definitional review → ,Where the approach comes from Published sources[10, 11, 16]

Challenge-based learning

Also written CBL

Learning that starts from a real situation rather than a syllabus, and moves through three phases: Engage, Investigate and Act. It spans the Innovator and Changemaker stages. At the Changemaker stage, something real depends on what happens in the Act phase.

On the venture pathway it is a thread that runs through every stage, not one step in a sequence.

Definitional review → ,How teaching is sequenced ,The thread Published sources[12, 13, 14]

Tinkering

Open, playful investigation of materials, led by curiosity rather than a set task. It is the research tradition behind the Explorer stage. It is still guided: the facilitator keeps it safe and helps when asked, without turning it into an exercise.

Definitional review → ,What is fluid, and what is fixed Published sources[5]

Hands-on

Learning by working with real tools and materials. It is the usual word for how this education is delivered: hands-on workshop, hands-on learning, hands-on experience.

Two other phrases are not used for this: practical, an older word in the organisation, and learn by doing.

Open experience

A first way in at the Explorer stage: a chance to try tools, ideas and possible domains. It is not assessed and needs no prior skill, though places, safeguarding and practical conditions still apply.

Delivery formats

Bootcamp

An intensive course that one cohort takes together, lasting anywhere from a few days to six months, most often around three. It has a start and an end, and not everyone who starts will finish.

A bootcamp supports a claim about a cohort, including how many of them finished. Reporting only the people who completed describes the survivors.

Event

A public occasion people can attend without enrolling: a fair, exhibition, open day, talk, hackathon final or awards night.

An event is counted in attendances, never as people trained.

Project

Two different things: a funded project, time-bound work agreed with a funder or partner, with a budget and an end date; and a learner project, what a learner designs and builds.

Workshop

A one-off session, typically one day, with a prepared agenda.

A workshop supports a claim about attendance and nothing more. It is never reported as a training outcome or as a completion.

Session

One meeting inside a course, bootcamp or school term. A session has a usual shape: opener, taught content, hands-on work, reflection.

A session is a piece of teaching, not an achievement. On its own it supports no claim at all.

Constructionism

Seymour Papert’s theory of learning: people build knowledge rather than simply receive it, and they build it most readily when they are making a public entity, something that others can see, discuss and argue with.

It is the theory maker education most often names as its foundation, and the one it most often follows only in name. Papert refused on principle to define the term more tightly, so a large body of research rests on a chapter that declines to define its own subject.

Definitional review → ,Where the approach comes from Published sources[1, 4]

Experiential learning

Learning through a repeating cycle: having a concrete experience, reflecting on it, forming an idea from it, and trying that idea out. It is the reason a reflection is required for a certificate.

The step that does the work is reflection. Experience without reflection stays a one-off event and does not carry over to the next problem.

Definitional review → Published sources[7]

Cognitive apprenticeship

Making an expert’s thinking visible: the facilitator talks through their reasoning aloud, coaches the learner while they try it, and steps back as the learner gets better at it.

It is how “guidance is highest where knowledge is lowest” works in practice: the support is meant to be removed, at the learner’s pace rather than the timetable’s.

Definitional review → ,How teaching is sequenced

Maker education

Education built around making things: the research literature’s term for learning by making. It crosses subjects by definition, and it is about a way of thinking rather than a set of machines. DreamSpace Academy calls its programmes that teach this way the STEAM programmes: electronics, robotics, digital fabrication, and music and media making, in schools and in the academy’s own spaces.

It is a research term, not the name of the academy’s education or of any part of it. The evidence is real but uneven: systematic reviews find good support for gains in creativity and engagement, and almost no study of long-term effects on livelihoods. This site reports both findings.

Definitional review → ,What the academy teaches ,Why making belongs in education Published sources[2, 3, 24]

Digital Security School

DreamSpace Academy’s programme that trains trainers in digital security for journalists, media professionals and civil society.

Because it trains trainers, the people it trains are counted as trainers, never as people trained in digital security. What they went on to teach is not on record.

What the academy teaches

Problem-based learning

A separate teaching tradition, which began in medical education, where learners start from a messy, open-ended problem and the curriculum follows from it.

Not part of this approach, and not what PBL means here. It is listed only so that the abbreviation cannot be read two ways.

Definitional review → ,Where the approach comes from Published sources[16]

TVET

Technical and vocational education and training: the sector most readers will place this work in, and the closest formal comparison to what happens here.

A systematic review of TVET programmes in low- and middle-income countries found effects that were positive but small, and often did not last. That is why the academy measures the “Earn” claim rather than asserting it.

Definitional review → ,Generating the missing evidence Published sources[56]

Community of practice

A group whose members learn through the work they share. Newcomers start at the edge on real tasks and move toward the centre, which is also how a working lab runs.

Definitional review → ,Where the approach comes from Published sources[8, 9]

Multidisciplinary

Several domains taught side by side. Real problems do not stay inside one subject, people arrive through different doors, and skills carry over from one domain to another.

The best-known definition of maker education already crosses subjects: a mix of the workshop, home economics, art and science. Making that is only engineering has already narrowed who will come.

Why the domains sit together ,Why the music room is next to the electronics bench Published sources[2]

STEAM

Science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, the frame the academy uses across its programmes. The STEAM programmes are the academy’s programmes in making, robotics, electronics, fabrication, and music and media making, including its programmes in government schools.

Arts, music and media are a large and continuing part of the academy’s work, so writing STEM would leave out a major strand. STEM is used only where a partner, an event name or a national policy uses it.

Trainer

Someone who teaches specific knowledge, skills or frameworks: a content expert, including people the academy does not employ. A facilitator guides the process; one person can be both.

A trainer is the right role for passing on hard skills: a technical tool or software, a safety procedure, or the basics a subject builds on. Where a local organisation has taken over running the teaching, it employs its own trainers. So “the academy’s trainers” is not always true of who taught something, and that is checked before it is written.

Devolving delivery

Head of the Lab

The person responsible for a lab. The title goes with the responsibility and moves when it does.

Different from a facilitator, which is a role that rotates rather than a post. A named Head is one of the four conditions before anything is called a lab, because the clearest lesson in the academy’s own history is that a lab with one champion closes when that person leaves.

What counts as a lab

Camp

An intensive course run over several days, sometimes with participants staying on site, with a fixed start and end date.

One of the named formats, alongside course, bootcamp, workshop and session. The format is always named rather than called “training”, because formats differ in how much teaching people get, and the research says that amount decides whether anything sticks.

Published sources[40]

Definition of Done

The standard that assessed work has to meet. The work must show six things, called evidence states, in any order: Aim, Options, Made, Evaluated, Shared, Refined.

They are kinds of evidence, not steps. They must never be drawn as a cycle, a loop or a sequence, and they are not taught as one. A fixed cycle that begins “identify a problem” suits engineering and fails music, art and much of design.

Definitional review → ,Evidence states

Aim

Evidence state: what the learner was trying to do, and for whom. The aim may have been set at the start or found halfway through.

Evidence states

Options

Evidence state: more than one way of doing the work was considered, and one was chosen for a reason.

Evidence states

Made

Evidence state: something exists. An artifact, a recording, a performance, a working system.

Evidence states

Evaluated

Evidence state: the work was tested against the aim, in a way the learner can describe (a measurement, a listener, a user, a run that failed).

Evidence states

Shared

Evidence state: the work left the workbench. It was shown, performed, published, handed to someone, or taught to another learner.

Evidence states

Refined

Evidence state: at least one improvement was made, based on what the testing or the sharing showed.

Evidence states

Artifact

The thing that was made: an object, a recording, software, a performance or a documented service. It is the first of the three kinds of evidence for a certificate.

Also called the hard result, when it needs to be told apart from the skills it shows.

Certificate evidence

Talk-through

A structured spoken explanation of the work at assessment: how it works, why it was built that way, and what was tried and rejected.

It is not an oral exam or a defence. It is the cheapest reliable way to tell real understanding from a well-followed instruction sheet, and it lets a learner show they understand without having to write well.

Certificate evidence

Reflection

A short written or recorded account of how the work went. It is the third kind of evidence for a certificate, and the step that lets a learner carry what they learned to the next problem.

Certificate evidence Published sources[7]

Hard result and soft results

The hard result is the thing that was made. The soft results are the abilities it shows: persistence, judgement, working with others, finding and fixing faults.

Both are recorded, in different ways. Soft results are described using published frameworks; they are not scored on a made-up scale.

How quality is judged

Certificate

What a learner receives for completing a course. It needs three kinds of evidence, not one: the artifact, the talk-through and the reflection. It names the course and level, never a stage.

Certificate evidence

Assessed work

Work that has to meet the Definition of Done. This applies from the Maker stage upward, which is also where certificates start.

Explorer work is never assessed. Being free of assessment is part of what the Explorer stage is.

What is fluid, and what is fixed

MakerSpace by DreamSpace Academy

A community makerspace that a local partner sets up and runs as a social franchise, built so that it can be repeated in other places. The partner provides the space; DreamSpace Academy provides the design of the unit (the equipment specification and layout), the brand, the operating standard and a licence to run its programmes there.

The academy’s education, labs and ventures do not depend on it. The programmes also run in schools, at partner sites, online and in the academy’s own spaces, and a MakerSpace is one of the places they can run. It is one thing DreamSpace Academy offers, not another name for the organisation.

The MakerSpace model

Makerspace

The general term for a shared workshop: a place with tools, materials, people who know how to use them, and a community around them, open to people who could not put all of that together on their own.

It is not an equipment room and not a computer lab. Where nearly everyone already gets online by phone, what is missing is a workbench, a machine and somebody who knows how to use them.

Definitional review → ,What a MakerSpace does not do ,A makerspace is not a computer lab Published sources[29]

Starter Unit

One new makerspace site, in the smallest set-up that can still meet the standard. The local partner that starts it pays for it, equipment included.

It is never called a franchise, a branch or a centre. Different from a Unit inside a course.

The Starter Unit

Social franchise

A way of repeating a model in new places: independent local operators run it under a shared standard, support package and identity, and the return is social good rather than profit.

Two franchise statistics that circulate widely are not used here: a survival comparison between franchises and startups, and any branded “five stages of scale”. Neither held up when checked against a traceable source.

Definitional review → ,Why a social franchise Published sources[49, 48, 51]

Fidelity

Staying true to the model: what must be the same at every site for a certificate to mean the same thing everywhere. That is the completion standard, the stage definitions, the safety rules and the assessment method.

Everything else is decided locally: the domains offered, the language of teaching, the timetable, the partnerships and the problems worked on. Fixing one list and leaving the other open keeps a new site from becoming either a brand with nothing behind it or an unrelated space that shares a logo.

What is fixed, and what is local

Shared project bank

A shared library of tested projects, briefs, curricula and assessment materials that every site uses and adds to.

It is the main thing a new site gets that it could not build alone, and the main reason the network is worth more than its sites added together.

The shared project bank

Ecosystem

The surroundings that make it possible to start and build new things: tools, examples to follow, expertise, introductions, first customers and peers. It is the key idea in how DreamSpace Academy describes its work.

Research finds that these surroundings explain whether people go on to start ventures better than any single programme they completed. That is why the enterprise strand runs through all the teaching instead of being added at the end. It is also why the people and connections around the work count as part of the work, alongside the teaching.

Definitional review → ,The category Published sources[34, 35]

DreamSpace Academy

The organisation this site describes: a non-profit social enterprise that co-creates an ecosystem to tackle local socio-economic and environmental challenges through education, innovation and entrepreneurship. It was founded on 30 September 2018 in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

The organisation is not itself a makerspace. The MakerSpace is one of the things it offers, and none of its other work depends on one.

The Dreams

Also written Co-Creating The Dreams, The tagline

The futures that become imaginable for a community when its people, knowledge, culture and opportunity meet through co-creation. They grow out of the work over time, they belong to the community as a whole, and they are never a fixed list.

DreamSpace is not a space where dreams are pursued. It is a space where new dreams become imaginable, so the name and the tagline say the same thing. The Dreams are collective; the route through them is individual: somebody who chooses a job over a venture, chooses research, or leaves entirely has not failed them. The Dreams do not mean outcomes such as jobs or income, hopes fulfilled on someone else’s behalf, the academy’s own ambitions, or one person’s dream.

The tagline

Grow Your Own

Also written GYO

The name for people who came through the academy’s programmes and now work in them or run them. It is also one documented route out of the academy’s education.

The name matters because the same thing can sound like a problem or a success depending on the words used. Universities call it academic inbreeding, teacher education calls it Grow Your Own, and research on makerspaces calls it near-peer mentorship. Two words that often come with the idea are not used here: candidate, which already means somebody entering the venture pathway, and career ladder, because the route is more like a lattice than a ladder: people move sideways and come back as well as move up.

Where people go

Peacebuilding

Work on what lets a divided community function: people getting along, reliable information, inclusion and trust. Here it is a way of looking at all three pillars, not a fourth pillar beside them.

The claim that can be defended is narrow. The evidence does not support “education and enterprise create peace”. It does support three narrower points: who gets access to education can itself feed conflict or calm it; informal, locally rooted programmes reach marginalised young people whom formal schooling does not; and programmes that combine several aims do better than single-purpose ones.

Social mission Published sources[65, 66, 67]

Hub

A DreamSpace site outside the place where the academy was founded. That is the only meaning the word has here.

Two other meanings are ruled out: a named room or facility within one site is not a hub, and “hub” is never used to claim size or importance. This stops a sentence like “hubs across the country” being read against a list in which some entries are rooms and some are closed.

The three pillars

Education, Innovation, Entrepreneurship: the three areas that everything the academy runs sits under.

Learn, Make, Solve, Earn are not the pillars. Research is not a fourth pillar either: it is the habit of checking evidence that sits underneath all three.

Social enterprise

What the academy calls itself: a non-profit social enterprise. The phrase describes how the academy is organised, not how the work is paid for. It does not claim independence from grants, and it does not claim to depend on them.

It is not the word for a venture that comes out of the academy’s work; that is an impact venture. Calling a learner’s venture a “social enterprise” confuses it with the academy.

Definitional review →

Capability

Everything a person needs to solve a problem themselves and to keep solving the next one: skill, tools, a network, capital, permission to act, a problem worth solving, and standing enough to be heard. It means the whole set, not just the first item.

The test for it is one question: does it last after the academy leaves? It is not “capacity building”, which usually fails that test, and it is not “skills”: a large majority of Sri Lanka’s unemployed are already computer literate, so skill is not what is in short supply.

The problem the MakerSpace addresses Published sources[58]

Local

Local to wherever the work is being done: a relation, not a location. Reading it as one fixed place would make the purpose untrue as soon as the work moves somewhere new.

Community

The people a piece of work is rooted in, and who live with its outcome. It is defined for each project rather than once for everything, and the first and third grassroots-innovation tests are how it is checked.

Not the same as the ecosystem. The ecosystem co-creates: the organisation, learners, partners, funders, visitors. The community owns. Mixing the two up makes it unclear whose problem was being solved.

Underserved

Having too little of a named service, or none, compared with the need for it. The word is incomplete until two blanks are filled in: underserved in what, and compared with whom. So every project says which service it means.

Not another word for marginalised, vulnerable or disadvantaged. Those describe exclusion, exposure to harm and lack, and each supports a different claim. The test is access: a community that has the service but gets poor results from it is not underserved in that service.

Definitional review →

Co-creation

Building with a community rather than for it, from deciding what the problem is through to who owns the result. It is the academy’s method, and also one of the four support modes.

Not another word for consultation or collaboration. The academy’s community co-creation check measures it with three questions: who defined the challenge, who made the decisions, and who owns the outcome.

Definitional review → ,The instruments that make the model testable

The co-verbs

Co-learn, co-innovate, co-produce: what happens between people in the ecosystem. The list is open, not fixed.

They describe the ecosystem; Learn, Make, Solve, Earn describe one learner’s path. The two lists are about different things, and they should not be matched up.

A solved local problem

What is counted toward the goal of one hundred by 2050: a grassroots innovation that passes all three tests. It is rung four, the top rung, of the innovation ladder, and nothing lower counts.

A site launched, a programme delivered, a learner trained or a prototype built is not a solved local problem. The strict definition makes the goal harder to reach, and it makes the count mean something.

What counts as a solved local problem

The Sustainable Development Goals

Also written SDGs

The global goals adopted in 2015. Results are linked to them so that outcomes can be read against a frame that is shared around the world.

Linking a result to a goal says which goal it relates to. It is never a claim to have moved that goal forward nationally or globally.

Published sources[64]

Learn, Make, Solve, Earn

Also written The four verbs

The four things DreamSpace Academy’s education offers a person. They run as threads through every stage of the Changemaker Journey. They are not a sequence, and they are not the four stages under another name. Whether they apply in the same way to the academy’s other teaching, such as business, digital security, workplace and teacher training, has not been decided.

There is good evidence that learning by making does the first three. The fourth, Earn, is the reason the academy built a system for measuring results at all.

What “Earn” claims

Earn

Income and work, split into three tiers with very different strength of evidence. Tier 1: small income, a maker selling what they made. Tier 2: a lasting livelihood, from a venture or from a job. Tier 3: work created for others, when a venture employs, contracts or buys locally.

The academy reports the three separately, not as one promise. Tier 1 is near-term and not in dispute. Tier 2 is a hypothesis that gets measured rather than asserted. Tier 3 appears in the research but has not been measured here, so it may be taught as an aim and is never reported as a result. Earn never means self-employment only: a participant who takes a good job counts as evidence for the approach.

What “Earn” claims

The enterprise strand

Research and development, entrepreneurship, and business and financial literacy, taught through every domain and every stage rather than added as a final module.

In one line: make it work, make it matter, make it last. It runs through everything because the useful part of entrepreneurship (mentors, introductions, a first buyer, support that continues) comes from a network of people, and a closing module cannot provide that.

Innovation & enterprise

Research & development

Also written R&D

The first area of the strand, make it work. Careful, methodical testing of something real: build a prototype, test it, write down what happened, repeat.

What the strand covers

Entrepreneurship

The second area of the strand, make it matter. Turning a working solution into something people want: spotting an opportunity, working out what value it offers, building a first simple version (a minimum viable product), and pitching it.

It is described using a published framework of entrepreneurial skills rather than one made up here, so that what is taught can be compared with what others teach.

Definitional review → ,What the strand covers Published sources[36]

Business & financial literacy

The third area of the strand, make it last. Costing, pricing, bookkeeping, marketing and operations.

The academy keeps it separate from entrepreneurship rather than folding both into “business”, because they fail in different ways: people can want what a venture offers and it can still fail because its sums do not add up.

What the strand covers

The sell loop

Make something, price it, sell it to a stranger, and then work out what the result showed. It is the cheapest way to put a maker in front of a real user.

It is a way of teaching, not a source of income for the academy. The learner keeps the money; the organisation earns nothing from it and budgets nothing from it. Once a learner’s sales count as the organisation’s income, the organisation has a stake in what children make, and the teaching is over.

How selling is taught ,Teaching enterprise by selling something

Innovation

A new or improved product or process that is clearly different from what came before, and that has been made available to the people who could use it, or put into use. This is the general definition in the Oslo Manual (OECD and Eurostat, 2018), and it is the main rule for counting the organisation’s innovations. Something built but never made available or used is innovation activity, not yet an innovation.

Innovations by learners and by communities are recorded separately, and no single total mixes them. Grassroots is a further test applied afterwards: not every innovation is a grassroots innovation, and that difference decides who becomes a Changemaker.

Definitional review → ,The innovation ladder

Grassroots innovation

An innovation that started from a real community challenge and passes all three of these tests: the problem came from the community; a real user who is not on the project team has tested it; and someone depends on the outcome.

It may be a product, a service or an initiative; the form does not decide whether it is grassroots. The first test asks where the problem came from, not who brought it in. A mentor or facilitator who names a real community problem passes, and that is the normal route here. What fails is a problem set for the occasion: a competition brief, a funder’s theme, a lab exercise, or the maker’s own curiosity. The term comes from published research on innovation driven by social need rather than profit. A South Asian strand of that research documents empathetic innovators who did not suffer the problem they solved themselves. So a learner need not have lived the problem, but must have taken it from someone who did.

Definitional review → ,Who counts as a Changemaker ,What counts as a solved local problem Published sources[46, 47]

The DreamSpace Lifecycle

Also written The venture pathway

The route from a person with an intention to a venture that stands on its own. It has three stages, one thread and four support modes.

It carries five names, and two of them are not stages: challenge-based learning is the thread that runs through all of them, and domain expertise is one of the support modes. It is never described as “the five stages”.

The DreamSpace Lifecycle ,Venture pathway

Changemaker Discovery

The first stage of the venture pathway, where people come in. There are two ways in: discovered, when field workers find someone who is already doing something; or co-created, when a learner arrives through the Changemaker Journey.

How people come in

Impact-Venture Building

The third stage of the venture pathway: turning a grassroots innovation into something that can keep running, such as a venture, a service, or a practice that a community keeps going.

Venture building

The four support modes

The help the academy offers people on the way to an impact venture: co-creation, bridging, domain expertise, and funding. They can be used in any combination and any order, before or after someone becomes a Changemaker.

They are not a sequence. No participant on record has used them as one, and presenting them as steps would describe something that does not happen.

Support, in any order

Bridging

Connecting a local problem with people and resources from elsewhere, and bringing what they offer back to the problem: introductions to funders, specialists, networks and international opportunities.

It is the support most often named as what sets the academy apart, and the least evidenced of the four. It has to run both ways: a one-way connection does not count as bridging.

Bridging, made countable

Impact venture

A venture that grew out of a real community challenge, has a believable path to paying for itself by trading, and cannot yet do so without support. All three parts are required.

Without the first it is an ordinary startup. Without the second it is a programme, and should be funded and named as one. Without the third it has graduated. The sector has no agreed definition of this term, so the one used here is stated wherever it matters.

Definitional review → ,Venture building

Graduation

Also written Self-sustaining venture

The point at which a venture pays for itself by trading and no longer needs support. Graduation is the name of that moment; what graduates is simply a self-sustaining venture, or a business.

“Impact venture” is a stage, and the label runs out. The measure that matters is how many ventures graduate, not how many are being supported right now. That second number rises whenever more work is taken on, and looks best when nothing is finishing.

The metric that matters

Startup

The general term for any new venture still looking for a way of working that pays, whatever its legal form: for-profit, non-profit, cooperative or collective.

It overlaps with impact venture but does not include it: most definitions of a startup require growth, and the definition of an impact venture does not. A venture that reaches a lasting local livelihood counts as a success here.

Definitional review → Published sources[37]

Entrepreneur

The person who starts and runs a venture. Entrepreneurs are what an ecosystem is made of, and support does not depend on having come through the academy’s own programmes.

Not another word for Changemaker, which is a stage on the Changemaker Journey that has to be reached with evidence.

Definitional review →

Incubation

Structured support for a new venture (space, mentoring, introductions, and sometimes money to invest) for a set period with a set end.

Support does not depend on the form a venture takes. The test is whether it strengthens the ecosystem, not whether it is a company, whether it makes a profit, or whether it came through the academy.

Organisational lifecycle

The life stages of an organisation itself: idea, start-up, growth, maturity, and what follows. It is a way of describing where an organisation is, not a path anyone is put through.

It is not “the Lifecycle”. That name belongs to the venture pathway, which is a planned route a person enters, has no stage of decline, and ends in success. The two are different kinds of thing that happen to share a word.

Definitional review → ,Venture pathway

Lab

A team working together in one making domain: the people who share a craft, a facilitator who keeps the work going, and the equipment the craft needs. A lab belongs to DreamSpace Academy, not to a building. It can run at the academy’s own premises, at a partner’s site, online or in a MakerSpace. It is only called a lab when four things are in place together: the making domain, a named person who maintains it, a team, and the date on which all of that was true.

No standing list of labs is published, and the default count is zero. What can be said is “as of this date, this lab is running, maintained by this person”, never “the academy runs n labs”. The zero is the count of standing labs, not of the work: software, media and music practice goes on without a standing lab. Labs are not part of what a MakerSpace franchise includes. A lab that closes is recorded as closed: closing is a status, not a verdict.

What counts as a lab

Theory of change

A written account of how the work is expected to lead to results (inputs, activities, outputs, short-term outcomes, medium-term outcomes and impact), and of what each step depends on.

The academy’s version runs as four parallel streams of work on a shared base of research, not as one chain, because a single chain could never match what is actually delivered. Every claim in it is graded for how well the evidence supports it, and the weakest ones are named rather than hidden.

Theory of change

The results hierarchy

Six levels of result that can never be swapped for one another: inputs, activities, outputs, short-term outcomes, medium-term outcomes, long-term impacts.

A workshop delivered is not a skill gained; a skill gained is not a job; a prototype is not a solved problem. Each level is reported on its own line, so the six can be read as a chain rather than merged into one number.

The results hierarchy

The innovation ladder

Four rungs that are often reported as if they were one: 1 a learner project, 2 a functioning prototype, 3 tested by a real user who is not on the project team, 4 a grassroots innovation.

How many projects drop off between one rung and the next is measured, because that is where the useful information is. Only rung four counts toward the goal.

The innovation ladder

Reach

How many people an activity reached. It is an output, not an outcome, and it is reported as one.

Attendances are not the same as different people, which is why a register that counts each participant once is part of the plan. A reach figure presented as impact is exactly the mistake the results hierarchy is there to prevent.

Baseline and endline

A measure of what a learner can do at the start and at the end of a course, based on that course’s own curriculum.

What is not measured is not claimed. Until this check exists for a course, no claim can be made about what learners gained from its content.

The instruments that make the model testable

Longitudinal follow-up

Planned contact with learners 3, 6, 12, 24 and 36 months after they leave, compared with a record of their livelihood taken when they joined. Neither the contact nor that starting record is in place yet. Together they are what would make the “Earn” question answerable at all.

Randomised evaluations of skills programmes have found that short-term gains in employment did not last to 12 to 15 months. A follow-up that stops before that point cannot detect the thing that matters.

When measurement happens Published sources[55, 56]

Hypothesis

A claim that is being tested rather than stated as fact, and is labelled as a hypothesis wherever it appears. The most important one is the second tier of “Earn”.

A hypothesis presented as a finding makes the whole body of evidence impossible to trust.

The reporting rules

Self-reported

A figure supplied by the person or organisation it describes. It is recorded and labelled as self-reported, never presented as a checked count.

Limitation

What a result cannot show, because of who was in the sample, the method, the timing, or other things that might have caused it. Limitations are published alongside the result, not in a footnote after it.

The reporting rules