Search for: All records

Explorations into students’ narratives of their pre-college making pathways inform our understanding of the nature of early making experiences prior to entry into undergraduate engineering programs. Through our student interviews, four pathways were identified based on the nature of how the activities were structured and the outcomes of the activities. Each of the two constructs identified were further differentiated into two poles identified as structured activities versus unstructured activities and specific curiosity versus diversive curiosity. Self-directed, unstructured activities are ones where individuals identified that their own independent work was performed with a great deal of autonomy in both how and what was explored. With structured activities, the individuals did not self-impose or seek out the activity, but rather, the activities were laid out by a mentor or expert. Specific curiosity is where a clear path in the form of a certain activity is started to gain a particular knowledge or skill. With curiosity of the unknown, however, an activity was undertaken for the pure exploration or interest with no identified outcome or specific knowledge gained. Using these definitions, the four pathways that emerged were structured-specific, unstructured-diversive, and unstructured-specific and structured-diversive. From the interviews collected and analyzed in this research from self-identified makers, three out of the four pathways are identified: structured-specific, unstructured-diversive, and unstructured-specific. Structured-diversive is absent in our dataset. We propose that the absence of structured-unknown activities is a result of the population interviewed rather than its absence among pre-college individuals.