From Classroom-Making to Functional-Making: A Study in the Development of Making Literacy

An important aspect of the Making ethos is the creation of artifacts that are personally significant through technological means. Many Making activities implicitly presume that participants have the mindset needed to be able to engage in such meaning-making processes before participation. We argue that attention has to be paid to how individuals may acquire this Making literacy in the first place before being able to participate in activities that are aligned with the Making ethos as it is currently most often understood. We present an approach to inculcate Making literacy in children through prescribed Making activities that are aligned with, and thus admissible in the elementary school science curriculum. Our analysis draws from video recordings of two 4th grade classrooms in which the students, who had already participated in 1.5 years of more structured 'makified activities', engaged in an open-ended, exploration-based, playful and more personally meaningful task that was more in line with the Making ethos. Our qualitative analysis demonstrates that a prescribed approach is able to inculcate a burgeoning Making literacy in students from a public elementary school, and thus prepare them to be able to engage in the creation of personally-meaningful artifacts effectively.1