Search for: All records

Purpose Designers of learning experiences are concerned with how people learn across a range of timescales from a semester to a single moment in time. And just as designing experiences at different timescales requires unique goals, tools, and processes, measuring what people learn from their interactions is also timescale-specific. The aim of our work is twofold: 1) To understand how learners describe their experiences with short-term, introductory maker experiences and; 2) To test a method for assessing learners’ experiences authentic to short-term learning. Design We collected written responses from participants at a two-day event, STEM Center Learning Days. Through an analysis of 707 unique instances of learner responses to participation in drop-in maker activities, we examined how participants describe their short-term learning experiences. Findings We found that although some activities appear to onlookers to create passive experiences for learners, these seemingly passive moments have a significant impact on learners. In addition, some learners described themselves as working in tandem with tools to make something work and other learners viewed the tools as working autonomously. We found that our assessment method allowed us to gain an understanding of how learners describe their experiences offering important implications for understanding short-term learning events. Originality/ Implications Our findings provide researchers studying short-term learning in its natural setting a new method to understand how learners make sense of their individual experience. Further, designers of short-term learning experiences may gain insights into their unique activities and indications of where additional guidance and scaffolds will improve small learning moments. Keywords Makerspaces, STEM, assessment 

In this article, we describe efforts to reduce barriers of entry to pre-college engineering in a rural community by training local teens to become maker-mentors and staff a mobile makerspace in their community. Following Nasir and Cooks (2009), we bring a communities of practice frame to our inquiry, focusing on inbound and peripheral learning and identity trajectories as a mechanism for representing the maker-mentor experience (Wenger, 1998). Through a longitudinal case study, we traced the individual trajectories of five maker-mentors over two years. We found that maker-mentors who participated in mentorship training activities, collaborated with their peers on making projects, and co-facilitated events throughout the community were more likely to follow an inbound trajectory. Maker-mentors who participated in training activities and collaborative making projects, but only facilitated one or two of the twelve community events never moved beyond the periphery. We offer lessons learned from including a mentorship component in a pre-college maker program, an unusual design feature that afforded more opportunities to create inbound trajectories. A key affordance of the maker-mentor program was that it allowed teens to explore areas of making that were in line with their interests while still being a part of a larger community of practice. Understanding learning and identity trajectories will allow us to continually improve pre-college engineering programming and education opportunities that build on students’ funds of knowledge.