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Makerspaces, workspaces where families can explore materials and tools collaboratively, can provide an opportunity for creative expression and early engineering learning in community spaces. The present study examined a cardboard-focused museum makerspace that included an assembly-style activity. Assembly-style making uses instructions to support makers. Such activities have been critiqued as limiting creativity and engineering thinking. However, makers who are less comfortable in makerspaces may benefit from assembly-style activities helping to scaffold their entry into the space. We explored these criticisms and potential benefits of assembly-style making through developing case studies of video data taken by families in a makerspace. Visitors made creative and personally meaningful creations when engaged in assembly style making. Moreover, assembly-style making mediated a family less comfortable with making to get started in the space alongside ample evidence of families following engineering design processes. Contrary to popular belief, assembly-style making offers an important support to novice makers, without eliminating creativity and engineering design processes, and should be considered in the mix of activities available in makerspaces to support makers of all levels of comfort in making. 

Abstract The museum field currently and historically has centered on the needs of White, educated, privileged, and affluent people, and changing that reality requires new ways of conceptualizing, organizing, and assessing our core practices. Practice‐based models—including specific stories of how museums and communities work together—are still needed in our field, both as guidance for structuring future projects and as inspiration for what is possible. We share a case study of a 10‐year makerspace design process and identify key features for sustaining community–museum relationships over an extended period of work, which we call community‐informed design. We describe five key aspects that promote sustainability in terms of community–museum relationships and the creation of high‐quality experiences: naming values and assumptions, emergent planning, flexible and distributed staffing, organization‐to‐organization relationships, and layered data. 

As several recent National Academies of Sciences reports have highlighted, greater science communication research is needed on 1) communicating chemistry, and 2) building research-practice partnerships to advance communication across science issues. Here we report our insights in both areas, gathered from a multi-year collaboration to advance our understanding of how to communicate about chemistry with the public. Researchers and practitioners from science museums across the U.S. partnered with academic social scientists in science communication to develop and conduct multi-strand data collections on chemistry communication and informal education. Our focus was on increasing interest in, the perceived relevance of, and self-efficacy concerning chemistry through hands-on activities and connecting chemistry to broader themes concerning everyday life and societal impacts. We outline challenges and benefits of the project that future collaborations can gain from and illustrate how our strands of work complemented each other to create a more complete picture of public perceptions of chemistry.