The maker movement, as we now know it, has been growing steadily for more than a decade. It has morphed from a buzz-generating phrase describing a subculture of creators passionate about blending DIY projects and technology to an established sector of society. According to stats from Atmel, which designs and manufactures microcontrollers, approximately 135 million adults in the U.S. identified as makers in 2015. Some makers aspire to follow in the hallowed footsteps of such famous innovators and inventors as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk, while others just enjoy tinkering and creating. And it’s likely they’ll easily find the tools to do so at a blossoming number of makerspaces (or innovation labs, hackerspaces, etc.)—more than 26% of U.S. cities boast at least one makerspace, according to analysis by the National League of Cities. There’s even a Global Maker Day (celebrated on October 23 this year).

The maker movement is not just for adults, however. It has been enthusiastically embraced by curious kids of all ages, and the movement has gained an increasingly strong foothold in K–12 classrooms and libraries (as well as public libraries), where it is also called maker education. The nonprofit organization Maker Ed has been a formidable facilitator for bringing maker-centered learning to students across the country, both inside and outside of schools. The group was founded in 2012 as the Maker Education Initiative by Dale Dougherty, widely known as the leader of the maker movement and the founder of Make magazine and the popular Maker Faire events across the globe. Dougherty’s company, Maker Media, is a major funder of the Maker Ed organization, as are Intel and Pixar Animation Studios.

Maker Ed, the organization, focuses on “educators and the institutions they work for” by providing training, professional development, and support for educators who want to engage their students with making activities. Maker Ed’s flagship program is called Maker Corps. Maker Ed trains makers for the Corps so that they can travel to various host sites in all 50 states and bring making to kids at museums, science centers, libraries, summer camps, and other partner agencies.

The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh (CMP) was among Maker Ed’s initial 34 Maker Corps host sites during the program’s launch year, 2012–2013, and received a micro grant made possible by Cognizant and Google for Entrepreneurs. In 2016, the relationship between Maker Ed and CMP grew when the two entities teamed with Google to launch a partnership called Making Spaces: Expanding Making in Schools Across the Nation. CMP became one of 10 hubs nationwide that each work with five to 10 regional schools. CMP completed a yearlong pilot run of the Making Spaces program during the 2015–2016 academic year, working with 10 schools in southwestern Pennsylvania and raising more than $100,000 to inaugurate maker education in those schools.

Whether it’s referred to as maker education or the maker movement, the concept at the core of making has been around for a very long time. “It’s not new,” says Heather Lister, senior maker fellow at the Foundry Makerspace in Harrisburg, Pa., and former director of maker education for Mackin. In their work at Foundry, Lister and other experts, including an engineer and a computer programmer, work with teachers in the Harrisburg City Schools to increase their knowledge of STEM and maker education. “We’re bringing in making to elevate what they’re doing in the classroom already,” Lister says. “Also, I am making sure that standards align and we have authentic assessments we can do.”

Lister must additionally work with administrators and help make the case for maker education. “And we do a lot of work with the building administration,” she says. “One real fear of the teachers is that if administrators don’t see the learning that’s happening, if they just see the play, or a mess, and kids laughing, then it’s going to reflect poorly on them. Your evaluation is tied to your pay; there’s a lot riding on it. So if you don’t have the support or even the open-mindedness of the administration, you might be reluctant.”

When Lister is talking about the maker movement with teachers, she goes out of her way to stress the point that making does not involve reinventing the wheel, so to speak. “I tell them, ‘We call it something different now, but we already know this. We all studied Piaget no matter what discipline our major was in education. We’ve all heard of Montessori and know who Seymour Papert is.’ There are so many learning theories that stress the power of learning through play and doing things with your hands, even for adults.”

And Lister says that she does still like to use the term maker movement. “I say that it’s a movement because it really is a grassroots effort that is coming from the teachers,” she notes. “It’s one of the few changes in education that has been from the bottom up as opposed to the top down. It’s taking what we know to be good learning, but it is coming from the teachers.”

Bill Bass, innovation coordinator for instructional technology, information, and library media for Parkway School District in West St. Louis County, Mo., says, “We’ve been doing makerspace stuff for a while now and the reason we do it, and why I think it’s exciting, is because we want to give kids multiple experiences to find the things that excite them.” And an engaged student is the goal of every teacher.

Lister echoes some of the tenets of “learning-by-doing” education theory when she posits that students who are engaged and emotionally connected to lessons will absorb them better. “As teachers we spend most of the fall reviewing things we feel kids should have remembered or that they lost over the summer,” she says. “Hopefully when it’s a deeper, richer experience, we won’t have to spend so much time reviewing these things over and over again each year. By making education engaging, we’re actually saving time not having to review stuff we wish they remembered the first time.” And those engaged students are not only learning things on a deeper level but, as another bonus for teachers, they have fewer behavioral problems in the classroom.

When the maker movement began to make substantial inroads into schools about 10 years ago, it was largely about a specific area in the school library or in a classroom where kids could collaborate, explore, and create using lots of tech and other tools. Sherry Gick, director of innovative learning at Five-Star Technology Solutions in Frankfort, Ind., warns that the true spirit and benefits of making can get lost when teachers and students are too dazzled by “stuff” they’re working with or the space in which it’s contained. “There have been some misconceptions, I think, where teachers think, ‘Oh this can only happen in the maker lab or we can only do this in the library,’ ” she says. Gick credits The Maker Mentality by Nick Provenzano (see “Creating the ‘Maker Mentality,’ ” p. 64), makerspace director and middle school technology coordinator at University Liggett School near Detroit, with presenting a key point about the maker movement that she hopes more teachers will take to heart. “It’s truly not the space; it’s what you’re doing and how you’re thinking about it. It’s making that connection and realizing that making can happen in any classroom, in any subject area, with low tech or high tech. I think that’s really what we’re trying to get out there about the maker movement.”

In some cases, schools and districts have purchased tech, received a grant for it, or maybe even inherited it but aren’t sure what to do next. “I don’t want them to have stuff that is just sitting on the shelf because they don’t see the integration of it,” Lister says. “I help them figure out how it all connects. You can go on YouTube and find tutorials for anything, about how something works. But what there isn’t a lot of out there is information on how I can use simple circuits in the context of a high school history class. We do a lot of workshops about curriculum connections because we want people to see the power of this.”

Lister’s fear is that making won’t be integrated into curricula the way it ideally should be. “We have these makerspaces, and they are awesome and amazing hubs of innovation,” she says. But she worries that when students and teachers leave the makerspace for a more typical classroom, they may be leaving their creativity and innovation at the door.

Bass agrees that tying making into curricula allows for a deeper learning experience. “One of the biggest advantages of the maker movement is it really does give kids an opportunity to explore in different ways,” he says. “And it gives librarians an opportunity to partner with classroom teachers and really delve into content differently than would happen alone, either in the library singularly, or in the classroom singularly. That partnership between them becomes a great opportunity to have that cross-collaborative space, and for libraries to support the curriculum and what’s going on in the classroom, through makerspace activities. That’s where I see the value, the benefit, and the maker movement really gaining traction.”

STEM, STEAM, and Making

One of the drivers of maker education growth in recent years is the focus on STEM education. In 2015, as a reaction to Department of Education statistics that showed very few American students pursue STEM careers or are skilled in STEM subjects, then-president Barack Obama announced a variety of initiatives to make STEM a priority. Federal research and forecasting demonstrates that our country’s labor force is increasingly in need of STEM-skilled employees in all sectors, and today’s students should be prepared for that job climate.

Lister believes that blending making and STEM can foster innovation and ingenuity. “There have been headlines saying ‘Where are all the Henry Fords, and Albert Einsteins?’ ” she says. “America’s innovation is on the decline, and statistics clearly show that. The number of patent applications is rapidly decreasing. Kids are not seeing how you can use coding and electronics in the context of humanities, for example. There’s a bigger picture, as a society and in terms of economic growth: we have to start churning out some kids that can do more than bubble sheets and just what we ask of them.”

Making can be the entrée that some students need to get them more interested in STEM, and in some cases it can serve as a type of academic equalizer. Kathy Lester, media specialist and technology coach at East Middle School in Plymouth-Canton, Mich., points out that sometimes students who are measured to be gifted and talented are not the ones who come up with the more interesting solutions to problems in the science making projects she does at her school (see “Making: A School Snapshot,” p. 74). “Gifted and talented kids have more perfectionism in them,” she says. “They are less willing to try something to see if it works and then fix it if it doesn’t work. I think this is a great project for them to see that this is the way science and problem solving happens. You can’t always just plan ahead.”

In addition, some teachers believe that making activities serve as a natural way to turn STEM education into STEAM education, because they add a design and creativity element to the critical thinking behind a lesson or project.

Making with a Heart

Though making and technology are a tailor-made match, making also aligns well with community service. Gina Seymour, library media specialist at Islip High School on New York’s Long Island, has focused much of her work on connecting making with helping others. To that end, she formed Maker Care Initiative so that students—and staff, too—in her school could create handmade products to help those in need. Some of the items they’ve produced for the homeless and hospital patients in their community include blankets, sleep mats, clothes, and toys. These efforts helped earn her recognition as a 2017 Mover & Shaker, as named by School Library Journal. Seymour has also packaged some of her ideas in the forthcoming book Makers with a Cause: Creative Service Projects for Library Youth (Libraries Unlimited).

In Michigan, Lester and her maker clubs participate in the Students Rebuild Healing Classrooms Challenge, an annual project sponsored by the Bezos Family Foundation. Students who take part in the challenge create a prescribed craft item (during the 2015–2016 school year it was a pinwheel). For each pinwheel kids made and mailed in, the foundation donated $2 to the International Rescue Committee’s program to help Syrian refugee children recover from crisis. “This past year it was portraits,” Lester says, with foundation money going to support programs that help youths on different sides of a conflict build peace. “I worked with the art teacher so we would have lots of portraits to send. The majority were drawings, but some did Legos and other interesting things. I want to do more projects like that.”

Making and Tech

Though a number of schools have been fortunate to secure funding for robotics, 3-D printers, or other high-tech items, such luxuries are not necessary to achieve top-notch maker education. Lister says she sees a lot of promise in elevating low-tech or no-tech lessons by adding some very basic tech tools. She points to a “simple but brilliant” project as an example: in a U.S. history class that was studying WWII, a set of Chibitronics circuit stickers and copper tape helped transform a traditional lesson into one with lots of dazzling light. Students were able to build simple, parallel, and stringing circuits controlled by a switch. With the push of a button, the Allied nations on a map light up, and another button illuminates the Axis powers.

“It took a pretty static project and made it interactive and amplified it,” Lister says. “And when you take a step back and look at all the learning that happens just to do that one project, and how much more learning was in that because of the addition of tech, that’s where I see a lot of the power.”

In addition to tech that helps students build physical things, Lister points out that there is a whole world of making that is completely digital. “There are lots schools that don’t have a 3-D printer, because it’s very expensive,” she says. “But because of the tools and software that’s available, we can still teach kids 3-D design without having a 3-D printer.” Students are now becoming skilled at creating virtual reality experiences and making their own video games using inexpensive digital products and applications. “We’re shifting kids from the consumer to the creator now,” Lister notes. “For every tool that comes out to be used as a consumer, there are a couple of extra options for kids to use it as a creator.”

Though Lister has a number of favorite tools (for a list, go to publishersweekly.com/sls2018makertools), she does emphasize to teachers that “the product itself has very little to do with making.” She adds, “Whenever we’re designing making activities, projects, or just the overall makerspace, we have to think about the purpose and the goals before we think about the products and the tools. We teach to an objective, we don’t teach a tool.”

Gick has an overarching message for educators when it comes to the maker movement, as well: “I think maybe one of the potential downfalls of maker education is that some people have thought that it is just a trend. Well, it’s not.”