Learn through Making: Gain 3 crucial skills for success
At the Maker Convening in Oakland, students are working together on making a piece of furniture that can seat a person. Working through drawings and plans, they figure out the materials and the tools needed to create a stool. They also ponder over questions like who will use it? What height should the stool be? Should it have 3 or 4 legs? What should be the size of the seat?
Over the next couple of days, they work on the project, taking full ownership of the design and making of the artefact. They now labor over its look: how to remove the burs, what polish to use, what color it should be, and how to make it stand out.
Over the years, learning by making has caught the fancy of educators the world over. Makerspaces have sprouted in schools, spaces where students design, prototype, test, and make artifacts that solve real-world problem-solving.
While maker-centered learning is touted as a 21st-century learning system that will help students learn STEM skills and prepare them for STEM jobs, research has identified two primary but far-reaching benefits: developing student agency and building character.
What is Agency?
Agency is feeling empowered to make choices about how to act in the world, or in simple words, an I-can-do-it mindset. Agentic behavior is about believing that you can make a change and being willing to act on it.
Agency is not about wanting to make a change, but about being the change: a critical thinking mindset, the ability to learn, and an affinity for action, both within themselves and the community. Agency is not necessarily about technology or computational thinking but a more fundamental human trait that has helped humans evolve into this mighty species. Agency is about figuring out how to approach problems instead of waiting for instructions through a manual or a teacher. It is about taking iterative risks, learning through failures and building on those failures.
Character Building
Another essential benefit researchers identified is character-building: competence, confidence, and forming identities. As children move from baseline competency to more complex making activities, they build competence which leads to increased confidence. As they develop they evolve from being somebody who can make to becoming a maker of things.
Karen Wilkinson, the much-acclaimed Director of the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, calls this the tinkerer’s disposition, the ability to dive into problems without clearly defined end-goals. Working on such projects in groups leads to general thinking dispositions: often called soft skills, non-cognitive or 21st-century skills.
General Thinking Dispositions
Researchers and teachers have found these shared characters and attitudes among students and young adults who make:
1 Makers are curious
2 Makers are playful
3 Makers are willing to take risk
4 Makers take on responsibility
5 Makers are persistent
6 Makers are resourceful.
7 Makers share
8 Makers are optimistic
If you are a teacher or a parent, introducing maker-based teaching strategies would help your wards develop these critical skills and attitudes that can help them grow into confident and capable makers of tomorrow.
