Making in schools: student learning through an e-textiles curriculum

ABSTRACT

Making and maker spaces have attracted increasing attention as potential sites for supporting K-12 student learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and as a means of competency development for computational and design thinking as well as technological literacy. While interest in making and maker spaces is high, little empirical research has been conducted that evaluates student learning through making in K-12 classroom spaces. In this study, we address this gap examining student learning through a making project: the construction of e-textiles, in this case, wearable hats, in a unit delivered in both a series of after-school workshops and as in-class lessons in a school in Ontario, Canada. Results demonstrated that students increased their understandings of coding and circuitry through making.

KEYWORDS:

• Making
• e-textiles
• student learning
• coding
• circuitry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The rise of interest in making and maker spaces has also resulted in its highly invested corporate base. While the current maker movement is often attributed to the launch of the, initially hobbyist Make magazine and its Maker Faire, Maker Faire (with over 200,000 attendees over its two locations) is now a rather corporate affair, with sponsors including Google, Microsoft, Intel, and LG, to name a few (Maker Media Inc., 2018).

2 Reporting on the same study, Lau, Ngai, Chan, and Cheung (2009) spoke to student preferences of subject matter during the workshop, with 46% selecting ‘t-shirt circuit design’, 33% ‘programming’, 7% ‘electricity circuit theory’, and 4% ‘integrated circuits’ (p. 507).

3 We include EQAO data because the school board does not release this information about its student population. Yet, we do so while also calling attention to an Ontario Teacher’s Federation’s (2011) report recommending that ‘it is time for Ontario to move away from its reliance on EQAO tests’ based on the fact that there are ‘efficient alternative ways of collecting data to make educational policy decisions that are less intrusive, time-consuming and costly’ paired with its findings that the EQAO places unnecessary stress of students, eats up teachers’ already limited instructional time, and that formative assessment is a more effective means of evaluating students’ learning than high-stakes, standardized tests (p. 11).

4 Students were given the choice to identify as boys, girls or other.

5 While the questionnaire also included a question asking students to draw a wearable, the question was omitted from analysis given difficulties researchers had with reaching consensus around evaluating the question.

6 One student abstained from responding (constituting 5% of ‘responses’).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.