The research of social-design-based maker education: based upon “The old man and the sea” text

ABSTRACT

Since 2015, the Taiwan government has endeavoured to uphold maker education for all-level schools. In addition to “learning by doing” or “learning through play”, maker education believed to have varied features that set it apart from preceding pedagogical approaches and have possibility to reform learners’ requisite competencies for future. Engaging with “social care” as the mind-set for example, it could drive maker movement towards a value-oriented disposition. This paper discusses the theoretical roots of maker education, collates its beliefs about the whole, and probes the correlation between social design and maker education. We studied how the experimental pedagogy of social-design-based making based on the text of “The Old Man and The Sea” was used at the 2017 New Taipei City Maker Workshop in Taiwan. And we constructed a case study to document its effects within the classroom context. The study revealed that the teaching model of social-design-based maker education would be the sequence as “topic choosing, problem defining, sympathy triggering, conception outputting, prototype making, integrating and sharing”, the proportion of teachers’/students’ roles in maker courses should be in half of the overall lessons, and teachers’ instructions should be concentrated on offering key questions and assisting on integrating learning points mainly.

KEYWORDS:

• Maker movement
• maker education
• social design
• design thinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

P. H. Hung

P. H. Hung, a Ph.D of National Taiwan University of Arts, with the degree of Creative Industry Design, who is also an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Learning and Materials Design, University of Taipei, Taiwan (2015-). Currently, she is a Director of Counseling in Beixin Elementary School, Taipei, Taiwan, and also a chief executive of maker education at school. Her research interests are in Maker Education, Arts Education and Cognitive Development.

Y. J. Gao

Y. J. Gao has earned her Ph.D at National Taiwan University of Arts, with the degree of Creative Industry Design. She is currently an instructor in the School of Fine Arts and Design, Guangzhou University, China. She has been researching and engaging in Arts and Design for many years, such as cognitive research, the mode of design transformation, and so on for her published papers. For three consecutive years (2015-2018), she has published HCI (International Conference on Human-Computer Interactio) conference in the United States and recorded in the United States' E.I. database

R. Lin

R. Lin is a Professor in the Graduate School of Creative Industry Design, National Taiwan University of Arts, Taipei, Taiwan. He is also the President of Taiwan Design Center. Professor Lin was President of Mingchi Institute of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan (1996-2002), and Chang Gung Institute of Technology, Tao-Yuan, Taiwan (2002-2003). He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Engineering Design at Tufts University, MA, USA. in 1988 and 1992. Lin authored numerous publications, authored or co-authored over 200 papers, and presented over 100 papers at professional conferences throughout the world. His research interests are in Ergonomics in Product Design, Human-Computer Interaction, and Cognitive Approach in Design. Recently, his research has been involved in Cultural and Creative Product Design.