Below is a breakdown of how you can incorporate maker education into your courses. For concrete examples of how this has already been done at UF, please see our examples.
Part 1: Inquiry
Any attempt to incorporate maker education should be rooted in inquiry. Inquiry can range from highly structured and instructor-led to completely open and student-driven. Instructors can adjust the level of student autonomy at each stage of the cycle to align with learning objectives, course structure, and assessment needs. This flexibility allows instructors to scaffold learning when needed while also giving students voice, choice, and opportunities for differentiation.
Focus
The cycle often begins by establishing a focus. In many cases, the instructor introduces the topic, subtopic, and learning objectives, but in more open-ended inquiry models, students may help define or even choose the focus themselves.
When instructors introduce the focus, it can be framed in ways that invite curiosity and questioning. This might take the form of an essential question, an observation, a real-world issue, a provocation, or a problem that needs solving.
Ask and Access
At the heart of inquiry are questions. Once a focus is established, students begin generating questions that help guide their investigation, and possibly even refine their focus. Instructors may model how to develop meaningful questions or help clarify student questions to ensure they are productive and relevant.
Students then begin accessing knowledge to explore these questions. This may include activating prior knowledge, discussing ideas with peers, or exploring initial sources of information. Depending on the level of scaffolding, instructors may guide this process closely or allow students greater independence in generating and pursuing their questions.
Research
During the research phase, students gather information that helps them better understand the focus and address their questions. Instructors may provide lectures, readings, or curated resources to guide this exploration. Alternatively, students may locate their own sources, analyze existing solutions, or conduct original research.
At this stage, students are not only learning what is already known but also identifying gaps in knowledge, emerging ideas, and possible directions for their work.
The infographic above shows the progression of inquiry from a highly scaffolded, lower-level thinking exercise, to a low scaffolded, higher-level thinking exercise.
Part 2: Maker Challenge
The Challenge and Making portions of the cycle are where students apply what they have learned during the inquiry phase by designing, constructing and testing a solution or artifact. The structure of the challenge and the conditions during making play critical roles in shaping how students engage with this section of the Maker Education cycle. The level of structure should be intentionally chosen based on learning objectives, available time and resources, and the degree of independence expected from students. Well-designed challenges create a direct link between knowledge gained and final product, while allowing students to make decisions, test ideas, and demonstrate their understanding through making.
Challenge
Challenges can range from highly structured, with clear parameters and constraints, to open-ended, where students have significant autonomy in defining both the product and the approach.
A Structured Maker Challenge would typically be a challenge with a predetermined product, limited/restricted materials, and opportunities for minor design changes to be made. These are introductory maker challenges which may be chosen because they can be completed in less time, require less materials, and are ideal for instructors with students who have never engaged in maker activities before. A structured maker challenge would focus less on design input from the students, and more on tool use, maker identity, making skills, student collaboration, and applying targeted applications of knowledge. In these challenges, instructors typically give more guidance and restrictions, limit the materials used in making, and set the parameters of the final product. Students can still reflect on their minor design choicecs, though they are more limited than higher level maker challenges.
A Guided Maker Challenge involves more student input with regards to materials used or final product, though limitations are still set by the instructor. Guided maker challenges typically take longer as they require more time planning, iterating and reflecting to be done by students. In a guided maker challenge, the instructor may set the parameters for the final product, but have no limitations on materials used. Alternatively, the instructor may limit materials, but leave the final product open to student choice, so long as it solves the challenge at hand. Guided maker challenges allow students to access more levels of the design cycle while applying concepts learned during the initial inquiry phase.
An Open Maker Challenge takes the most time, but gives the students the most freedom to fully engage with the design cycle and higher levels of problem solving. In open maker challenges, students are permitted to solve the challenge at hand any way they see fit, choosing both the type of end product, and the materials used to create it. The challenge must be open, and have little to no parameters for the final product while still addressing the focus. With these challenges, students are able to fully reflect on both the application of knowledge learned and the entirety of the design cycle.
Instructors can also differentiate and allow for students to choose their level of maker challenge. For examples, an instructor may present the option to do a structured, guided or open challenge, or have students complete two guided challenges in different ways and compare/contrast their design choices.
Make and Create
The making conditions can be highly guided, with instructors heavily facilitating with guiding questions, or more free, with students taking decision-making responsibility.
While students are engaging in the design cycle, it is imperative that questions are asked to promote reflection. These questions can be asked by the instructor to encourage deeper thinking and/or asked by the students for a less scaffolded approach. The questions are geared to challenge students to think about their design choices and how they will specifically address the challenge at hand. Instructors can ask students what factors they need to consider for their design (such as durability, waterproofing, exposure to UV, etc), who the intended users of their product are and how that may affect their choices, the scalability/reproducibility and associated costs of their design, etc. If students are asked to come up with these questions on their own, there should be some visibility of this reflection in the final product.
Part 3: Reflect and Apply
Arguably the most important part of any maker-based activity/lesson/unit/course is the students communication of their understanding and reflection of their proccess.
Apply
Students should demonstrate how the knowledge gained during inquiry informed their design decisions and final product. Application may be evident through the functionality of the artifact itself, the rationale behind design choices, the ability to justify decisions using evidence gathered during inquiry, or the adaptation of knowledge to new contexts and problems. Students may communicate their learning through presentations, written explanations, demonstrations, portfolios, videos, comics, or other formats that align with course goals.
Reflect
Reflection provides students with an opportunity to examine both their product and their process. Students may reflect on how their knowledge evolved, how inquiry informed design decisions, challenges encountered during making, tradeoffs considered, and how they responded to failure or unexpected outcomes. Reflection should encourage students to connect their learning to future projects, courses, or real-world situations.