Are you Faculty or a Graduate TA looking to add some hands-on experiential learning to your teaching? The Marston Makerspace is a great place to start!
What is Maker Education?
Maker education is a way of teaching and learning built around projects and challenges in which students design and create tangible artifacts. Although it historically emerged from STEM environments, maker education is inherently interdisciplinary and can be applied across nearly any subject. Maker education pulls from both Inquiry-Based Learning and the Engineering Design Cycle.
In maker-centered lessons, instructors design experiences that encourage students to explore ideas by building and experimenting. Alongside lectures, readings, and research, “making” allows students to engage with concepts in a hands-on way that deepens understanding. This approach is rooted in the learning theory of constructionism, which suggests that people learn most effectively when they create meaningful artifacts that represent their ideas.
Because of this, maker education encourages students to draw on prior knowledge, apply new concepts, and make their thinking visible through the design and creation process. It fosters exploration, collaboration, creativity, iteration, and reflection as learners test ideas, learn from mistakes, and refine their work.
What are the Benefits of Maker Education?
Maker education encourages innovation by challenging students to design and build solutions to meaningful problems. In the process, students develop resourcefulness, creativity, and a sense of ownership over their learning, as making naturally invites student choice and voice. Through designing and building, learners engage in hands-on problem solving, experiment with materials and tools, and practice iterative thinking as they test ideas, learn from failure, and refine their work.
While these benefits are often associated with STEM education, maker education can be especially powerful in non-STEM subjects. In disciplines such as history, literature, or the social sciences—where ideas are often abstract—making allows students to represent concepts in tangible ways. By constructing artifacts, models, or prototypes, students externalize their thinking and demonstrate how they interpret complex ideas, systems, and relationships. This process activates higher-order thinking skills as students apply knowledge, synthesize information from multiple sources, and justify their design choices. In doing so, maker education transforms learning from passive consumption into active creation, helping students develop deeper and more meaningful understanding.
What is needed to engage in Maker Education?
Maker education does not require expensive equipment, but it does require a few key conditions for success.
Environment and Tools
For students to design and build solutions, they need a place where making is possible. This means having access to tools, materials, and a safe, supportive environment where students feel comfortable experimenting, trying new ideas, and even failing along the way. A maker environment does not need to be sophisticated, sometimes a simple table with hot glue and popsicle sticks is enough to spark creativity.
That said, the University of Florida is fortunate to have a space specifically designed to support this type of learning. The Marston Makerspace provides students with access to tools, equipment, materials, and collaborative workspace where they can explore ideas and bring their projects to life.
Time
Making takes time. Students need the opportunity to move through the full design process: planning, building, testing, revising, and reflecting on what they have created. Without adequate time for iteration and reflection, making risks becoming a simple craft activity rather than a meaningful learning experience.
Instructor Mindset
Perhaps the most important ingredient is the instructor. Maker education is grounded in inquiry-based learning, meaning that instructors act less as lecturers and more as facilitators of exploration. Through thoughtful questioning and guidance, instructors encourage students to think deeply about their design choices and the ideas behind them.
Equally important is the design of the challenge itself. Effective maker activities are intentionally structured so that the process of designing and building helps students engage with course concepts and meet the intended learning objectives.
The Cycles of Maker Education
The Maker Education Cycle is fundamentally rooted in inquiry-based learning, where students are encouraged to ask questions, seek answers, create something that represents their learning, discuss their learning, and reflect on their process.
In the case of Maker education specifically, the product that is created is a tangible artifact. At higher levels of thinking, the students are encouraged to create this physical product by engaging in the engineering design cycle.
Depending on the scope of the assignment, unit, learning objectives, etc., during the investigate/research phase of the Maker Education cycle, students may engage in their own research design and data collection.
The Maker Education cycle shown above incorporates elements of the inquiry cycle (asking questions, researching, creating, and reflecting) while centering on a challenge that may lead students to engage in the design cycle as they develop and build a tangible artifact.