Danielle Martin - Start Making!: A Guide to Engaging Young People in Maker Activities

Start Making!

A Guide to Engaging Young People in Maker Activities

By Danielle Martin and Alisha Panjwani

Natalie Rusk, Editor

Copyright 2016 Museum of Science and MIT. All rights reserved.

Printed in Canada.

Published by Maker Media, Inc.,
1160 Battery Street East, Suite 125,
San Francisco, California 94111.

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Publisher: Roger Stewart

Editor: Roger Stewart

Copy Editor and Proofreader: Rebecca Rider, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Interior and Cover Designer: Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Indexer: Valerie Perry, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

April 2016: First Edition

Revision History for the First Edition

2016-04-05: First Release

See oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781457187919 for release details.

Make:, Maker Shed, and Maker Faire are registered trademarks of Maker Media, Inc. The Maker Media logo is a trademark of Maker Media, Inc.

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and Maker Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps.

While the publisher and the author have used good faith efforts to ensure that the information and instructions contained in this work are accurate, the publisher and the author disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions, including without limitation responsibility for damages resulting from the use of or reliance on this work. Use of the information and instructions contained in this work is at your own risk. If any code samples or other technology this work contains or describes is subject to open source licenses or the intellectual property rights of others, it is your responsibility to ensure that your use thereof complies with such licenses and/or rights.

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Make: unites, inspires, informs, and entertains a growing community of resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages. Make: celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your will. The Make: audience continues to be a growing culture and community that believes in bettering ourselves, our environment, our educational systemour entire world. This is much more than an audience, its a worldwide movement that Make is leading we call it the Maker Movement.

For more information about Make:, visit us online:

• Make: magazine makezine.com/magazine
• Maker Faire makerfaire.com
• Makezine.com makezine.com
• Maker Shed makershed.com
• To comment or ask technical questions about this book, send email to bookquestions@oreilly.com.

Start Making! workshop (Hennepin County Library Best Buy Teen Tech Center, Minneapolis, MN)

A few years ago a small team of us at Intel developed an outreach program drawing on the skills and passions of our resident makers, which we called Start Making! Our aims were to complement Intels ongoing efforts to inspire students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and to attract a more diverse population of youth to consider educational and career pathways in technology.

Intels Jay Melican with Clubhouse youth at the Bay Area Maker Faire

We believe that great numbers of young people out theresome of whom, for one reason or another, do not necessarily self-identify as strong in engineering or designcan and will make major creative contributions toward building our (necessarily technological) future. Furthermore, we believe we must reach those young makers through nontraditional channels. We can open the doors to creative careers in high tech and help minimize the barriers to entry by

• Eliminating the intimidation factors that some students may associate with STEM subjects
• Highlighting the hooks that will appeal not only to the mechanically- and mathematically-inclined novice makers, but also to those who are naturally gifted in expression through textile arts, spatial arts, performance arts, music, and so on
• Offering tools that enable immediate success and providing environments that support inclusivity, open learning, and creative exploration

The Maker movementa recent wave of tech-inspired, do-it-yourself (DIY) innovationis sweeping the globe. Participants in this movement, known as makers, take advantage of cheap, powerful, easy-to-use tools, as well as easier access to knowledge, capital, and markets, to create new physical objects. This revolutionary change in how hardware is innovated and manufactured has great potential to change the future of computing, particularly for young people from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields: females, racial and ethnic minority groups, and people with disabilities.

By empowering girls and young people from other underrepresented groups to just Start Making! we can open the doors to technological innovation (and to the recognition of potential career opportunities in high tech) for a large and extraordinarily talented crowd of young makers who may otherwise be locked out by traditional STEM education programs.

Start Making! Clubhouse Coordinator workshop, Denver, CO

Four years after we started down this path at Intel, we are thrilled to see that Start Making! has grown, matured, and evolved under the expert guidance of The Clubhouse Network team, in collaboration with the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. The original spirit behind the effort to educate a generation of makers has been amplified as more and more creative, talented, local facilitators have customized the program to engage youth from their communities. Through a knowledge-sharing network of almost 100 Clubhouses, The Clubhouse Network is enabling thousands of young people to practice making in their daily lives. This book aims to expand that reach and broaden the community of young makers even further by sharing these ideas and approaches.