Learning can happen at different grain sizes of community engagement, but youth benefit most of all when teachers and programs intentionally support community connection as part of the process. This was evidenced in both THF and the SAL challenge team. The residents at THF engaged with a local maker community in association with the internal maker community they had formed within their housing space through regular participation and interaction. At times, the local community visited THF, i.e. guest makers. Other times, residents visited the local community makerspaces. In both cases, the local maker community provided residents with social and engaging experiences with making and encouraged long-term participation and learning. Guest maker nights at the makerspace were among the most popular; on such nights, attendance swelled from four or five residents to nearly the whole building. As Asa described it, “Let’s say we go to [a maker faire] or something; I get to step outside of business, boring American 401k plans, and get to genuinely be myself…” (Chapter 3.0).
The air team engaged both with an internal community of makers and drew upon global, online community resources. In a sense, groupwork in making allows a team of students to function as a mini maker community. In the air team, even those students that were not actively involved in building offered advice, feedback, and input. Tool runners learned to identify equipment and materials, even if they were not making. Documenters had to examine the process in front of them and ask questions to effectively capture thinking, progress, and growth. While these types of engagement would not individually lead to the full range of learning outcomes possible for makers, they each supported learning of skills within various maker learning categories, such as process skills like fluency with tools and materials (Chapter 2.0). Students learned from each other as much as from online tutorials, discussing and debating the functionality of designs together. A student
who rotated between these roles, then, would likely have opportunities to obtain a full range of maker learning outcomes, including process, motivation, and community outcomes; this strategy is recommended to support learning in other types of groupwork settings for heterogeneous groups of students (Cohen & Lotan, 2014).
In speaking about community, one must also discuss relationships and interactions. Li’s (2014) Simple Interactions tool works to identify the kinds of interactions that support developmental relationships; Li and Julian (2012) argued that developmental relationships are the active ingredient in improving education. The types of interactions that youth engaged in within our studies offered opportunities for two-way, reciprocal interactions that benefit growth and development, i.e. a give-and-take between novice and expert, but others resulted in one-way interactions where youth obtained information but did not engage socially with the source of information within the maker community. These were most evident in Chapter 4.0; the air team regularly sought guidance from online sources in the global maker community but did not post comments or questions on the online sources they researched, nor did they answer questions or offer feedback to others. The information they found online did frequently form the basis for the decisions and discussions they had as a team during their design process, ultimately leading to reciprocal interactions. Occasionally, the team also benefitted from the community of makers Mr. Mancina had created across his physics classes; an air team from another class struggle to make their drone fly and offered advice and feedback. These interactions demonstrate one of the key community and learning skills in Bevan et al.’s (2015) Tinkering Learning Framework, a measure found in Chapter 2.0 to incorporate all three categories of maker outcomes; helping and inspiring others are part of what characterizes community interaction as a maker and both bear implications
The residents’ engagement with the maker community at THF (Chapter 3.0) were all in- person, social, and potentially reciprocal interactions, although some residents worked alongside facilitators more easily than others. The residents at THF rarely researched information online; there was only one computer in the makerspace for most of the study and youth typically used it only when facilitators directly encouraged them and prompted the researching process. Interactions with the facilitator and social worker formed the primary basis for obtaining feedback, advice, and information in the makerspace. Although residents rarely, if ever, worked together on a project, others’ casual comments and projects often served to influence and inspire the makers. Online platforms in maker education can provide students with a rich basis of learning resources and offer the possibility of being connected to makers across the world, but the kinds of one-way interactions that easily happen in online platforms limit the benefits youth derive from the experience. Take the following example; although MAKE: Magazine does represent a limited perspective of who makers can be and what counts as making, it does illustrate how even online a larger, world-wide community of makers can offer connection, shared intellectual resources, and a sense of solidarity, as evidenced in the image below (see Figure 17). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the hub acted as a platform for connecting makers everywhere to information about how to use making as a weapon to combat the virus, even encouraging makers to think of themselves as the “maker army” (Grinstein, 2020).
Figure 17 A screenshot of posts from MAKE: Magazine’s page demonstrates how the platform encourages solidarity, cooperation, and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Posts such as these encourage makers to feel connected to a larger movement, in this case against a common problem, and offer resources for learning how to make something practical and potentially useful to many makers. On the other hand, these are news articles that do not prompt makers to respond, engage, and ask questions, despite the fact that most online platforms at least offer a comment section for posting replies. In other cases, language barriers may prevent two- way interactions. The students of the air-team relied on a narration-less video produced in China
find English subtitles and did not try asking questions in the YouTube comments; it is doubtful whether the video’s producer would or could have responded to their questions. Although these types of interactions can easily take place in social situations within an internal makerspace community (Akiva et al., 2017), interactions that promote developmental relationships and legitimate peripheral participation online may be more difficult to facilitate. This suggests that when utilizing online platforms, regardless of OST or in-school context, educators should intentionally guide students to participate in reciprocal interactions that support their learning process. Intentional teacher practice and program design could support high quality interactions with internal, local, and global maker communities.
Groupwork, perhaps the smallest grain size of internal maker communities in schools, has recently been celebrated in education for its potential as an instructional tool that allows youth with heterogeneous skills and characteristics to develop social-emotional, 21st century collaboration skills at the same time as learning collaboratively from the varied abilities of their peers. Makerspaces offer exciting possibilities for supporting heterogeneous group work in and out of schools. The youth in Chapter 4.0 were able to push the boundaries of what they thought they could accomplish when working as a group, motivate each other when they were frustrated or confused, and most of them ultimately became friends through the process. As individuals, it may have been impossible for them to complete a mostly-functional drone in 30 hours spread over four months. The youth in Chapter 3.0 could have benefitted from all these experiences, particularly as learning to have healthy social relationships and building social-emotional skills was part of their goals at THF. Despite the potential benefits, contextual factors, group dynamics, assessment, and maintaining motivation in collaborative making can present challenges for instructors.
Context makes a difference for supporting group work in educational makerspaces largely because although the completion of group assignments is compulsory in schools, participation in OST programs and the activities offered therein is voluntary. In the case of drop-in maker spaces, it may not even be practical to ask patrons to work together. In schools, teachers may require students to work in assigned teams and offer extrinsic (external) rewards such as grades and praise for successful collaboration, though potentially to the detriment of motivational outcomes (Ames, 1992; Heyman & Dweck, 1992). Although THF residents typically lived in the same building as the makerspace for months or years and could have engaged in long-term collaborations, collaborating was not actively encouraged and guided. No residents in Chapter 3.0 elected to work collaboratively, perhaps because social dynamics for the recently-emancipated, vulnerable youth were often tense; the social worker who oversaw maker sessions stated in interviews that it was her role to keep the peace and uphold THF policies.
As was true for several students in Chapter 4.0, collaborative maker projects also run the risk of having “too many cooks in the kitchen” (Martin, Dixon, & Betser, 2018). In other words, one or two makers may take over all the building and designing to the exclusion of others. Even if most of the group has a role in the building and designing process, some roles may be reduced to running errands, thus achieving outcomes in only one or no areas of maker learning outcomes (Chapter 2.0), and regardless of in school or OST contexts, young makers may give up on the collaborative project altogether (Martin, Dixon, & Betser, 2018). Drop-in makerspaces like that at THF present a different problem; when youth only engage in collaborative projects voluntarily, the process is not an intentional, guided collaboration leading to specific youth outcomes. Youth may abandon the collaboration or engage only to socialize with peers and may thus miss out on
Lotan’s (2014) heterogenous groupwork model suggests that for groups to work as a maker community for supporting learning, youth must be guided to rotate roles in groupwork in order to learn the full range of skills that are necessary to reach non-maker outcomes and to improve engagement in the maker community i.e. legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991).