Aim for the sky: Fostering a Constructionist Learning Environment for Teaching Maker Skills to Children in India

The education system in schools in India at large focuses on the transmission of knowledge to students and sets the expectation to simply memorize and reproduce it on tests in the form it was originally taught to them. In order to lay the ground for teaching 21st-century skills, it is imperative to go beyond the confines of the textbook and lecture-based learning and to encourage applying the knowledge imparted in the classroom in creative contexts and to solve problems. The paper discusses the workshop conducted to teach maker skills in the context of STEM-based learning to eighth graders in a semi-urban school in India. The students were taught to work with tools and the principles of design and the science required to create and launch water rockets. Pre-workshop and post-workshop surveys were conducted to measure for change in intrinsic motivation and general self-efficacy of the students who participated in the making activity. The results reveal a reported significant reduction in performance related tension and pressure after participating in such collaborative activities among other findings that are discussed in detail in the paper.