My friend, learning consultant Kyle Brumbaugh, wrote about the hard part of sustaining school makerspaces. Kyle addresses the “soft money” of grants and donations that buy the sexy stuff like 3-D printers and laser cutters, but fall short with the less glamorous maintenance, supplies, and staffing. That latter part is crucial.
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| Image from ChatGPT |
Kyle knows what he’s talking about. He wrote a $500,000 grant to establish the makerspace at the Krause Center for Innovation in Los Altos Hills, California. That same grant included the makerspace coordinator certification program that I took, as part of its first cohort, in 2018.
Successful school makerspaces are islands of enlightenment. But many in the US lack the institutional and philosophical underpinnings necessary to make them effective and sustainable. CREATE lasted 10 years before fading. Oh, the room is still there, but it’s underutilized and its daily light flickered out when I retired this past June.
In my school, I was the center of that institutional passion. While my teachers were busy keeping too many educational “plates” spinning, I maintained the physical space. I presented annual safety briefings, developed, ran, and scheduled activities, stayed plugged into maker ed developments out in the world, etc… In engineering parlance, I was the single point of failure for the entire program.
Computer Science & Engineering Dept. Chair at Pinewood School in Los Altos, Calif., Jonathan Brusco, wrote about makerspaces on LinkedIn, “…programmatically they often fail because administration often thinks that simply having the space is enough. They rarely schedule time, build it into the curriculum, or staff it well.”
The presentation that I give to educators about makerspaces is called “Elementary Makerspaces: Why and How (In that order.)” The “why” is by far the most important part. If a school’s staff does not sincerely buy into the philosophy of maker ed, the space has no reason to live. Understanding and executing at the nexus of learning and making is what makes a school makerspace relevant.
For many school administrators, makerspaces are the next shiny thing to implement on their campuses. Rather than starting with the Constructivism philosophy of Piaget and the Constructionism philosophy of Seymour Papert, they superficially emulate programs that they have seen elsewhere—an admin version of “keeping up with the Joneses.” For them, it’s all about the physical space and its hardware. Often, students use it only for teacher-directed “recipe” projects in which they use commercial kits of identical components to make identical artifacts, rather than using their imaginations to work through self-directed learning journeys that result in durable and internalized learning.
Without that enduring driving philosophy, a school makerspace can appear vibrant and useful, but it is really the educational version of The Walking Dead—its participants accomplishing little more than prescriptive arts and crafts. Self-examination is necessary before starting a makerspace. Know your “why” and your "who" above everything. The hows, the wheres and the whats will come.
Every Makerspace Runs on Soft Money — Here's What That Actually Costs
Plate spinning routine
https://youtu.be/k44uoVm0lPI?si=anUf8_J0y_EkA0t5
Makerspace Coordinator Certificate
https://regionalcte.org/browse/Z2b9Z
Piaget's Theory of Constructivism
https://www.teach-nology.com/currenttrends/constructivism/piaget/
Situating Constructionism
https://web.media.mit.edu/~calla/web_comunidad/Reading-En/situating_constructionism.pdf
Zombies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie
