Makerspaces and STEM/STEAM Education

This chapter addresses the topic of makerspaces and maker education. Makerspaces are workspaces where people with common interests, often in computers, technology, science, digital and electronic art, and many other domains, can meet and collaborate on projects to design, develop, and create innovations. The rapidly expanding educational and artistic uses of makerspaces is now giving rise to a new wave of applied, multidisciplinary learning experiences. There is a growing recognition that maker-centered education has the potential to transform how and what can be learned in STEM and STEAM. In this chapter, we discuss a national study of maker educators in the US, the Harvard Agency by Design Project, finding that among the most significant gains afforded by maker-centered learning experiences are individual and collective learning, agency and character building, and a sense of maker empowerment. We also take you inside the Rutgers University Maker Education Graduate Certificate program that the Rutgers Center for Mathematics, Science, and Computer Education (CMSCE) developed and launched in partnership with the Rutgers Graduate School of Education—a 15-credit sequence that can be completed in approximately 16 months. The program was designed to help educators, librarians, media specialists, and other practitioners to receive the professional development and resources necessary to develop competence and high confidence to start and supervise a Makerspace, or lead maker-based courses and projects. The program is still young, but we share some early signs of success in terms of the teacher participants’ designing of makerspaces transforming their schools and how it provided students with sophisticated tools for thinking and developing personal capacities including the ability to design and create solutions to real-world problems.