Tan, Michael Lip Thye

While here is ample research on how youth are connected in online spaces and how youth participate online via sharing and reviewing artifacts, yet less is known about how these social connections and contributions emerge, especially in the context of physical making and what can they contribute to learning and assessment. Thus, our symposium primarily addresses two questions: (1) How do youth connect and learn in online maker communities? and (2) How can we design online maker tools for learning in and out of schools? We share efforts examining how sharing artifacts, documenting design processes, and providing feedback via online tools can support young makers in creating physical artifacts and offer insights to new assessment models.

This study aims to document two layers of analysis concerning the educative benefits of making in makerspaces. While makerspaces are often closely associated with particular digital fabrication technologies in the public imagination, this study takes an expanded definition to include any sort of making that involves modifying materials according to one’s own plans, and not simply following instructions for assembly. While this would include conventional Design and Technology, Fabric work, and even Food and Nutrition, I have chosen to focus on the production of new scientific knowledge, especially through investigations that deal with electronic instrumentation and the imbuing of programmed behaviour through the use of simple electrical operations, or complicated micro-controller based designs. In Part 1 (reported here), I ask the question: what are the reasoning processes of students as they engage in creative problem solving tasks involving the making of an artefact?

While most are familiar with the idea of using a video camera as a generic recording device, a deeper understanding of what happens “behind the camera”; the biases that audio and video recording usually are accompanied with; and the type and level of analysis of recorded footage, is still largely lacking in many educational research communities. In this paper, a quick survey of some technical, methodological, and analytic issues is presented with a view to introduce to the reader some established paths to pursue for further study. A brief presentation of work attempted elsewhere is also offered, and several suggestions for incorporating video into research in the local context are proposed for the reader’s consideration.

In Singapore, there have been numerous calls for education to prepare individuals for participation in innovative economic processes, increasing in magnitude especially since the launch of Thinking Schools, Learning Nation around the turn of the century. The economic imperative has always been, and will probably remain for the foreseeable future, a prime existential driver of policy in Singapore, However, an argument exists that for education, more intrinsic purposes ought to be considered: in addition to being a more ethically defensible position, the non-trivial problem of predicting the future based on past events may pose too great a risk to policy planning, especially when changes take many years to see results. With makerspaces in education, there is great temptation to jump on the bandwagon, and deploy this cultural technology with little critical appreciation. In light of our knowledge from the deployment of computing and information technologies, it might be wise to consider carefully how makerspaces ought to be deployed. In this paper, I will expand on the foregoing arguments, to also make some recommendations on curricula and instructional principles for the wise deployment of makerspaces for high educative value.

Beginning from the question of how we know what we know in science, the author asserts that understanding scientific knowledge requires us to know more than the abstract concepts typically presented in schools. The social and material aspects of knowledge are also important -- these take the form of questions such as: What is the interplay between knowledge and power? How do we understand that we can have a "feel" for materials and artefacts that we cannot completely describe in words? How do we know what ideas ought to be made real though technology and engineering? Significantly, this book also discusses the ethical dimensions of STEM education, in thinking about the kinds of STEM education that could be useful for open futures. This book will be useful to graduate students and educators seeking an expansive view of STEM education. More generally, these ideas outline a possible new strategy for a vision of school that is not merely training or preparing students for work. Education needs to also prepare students for sociopolitical participation, and with STEM being central to our contemporary lives, this book provides insights for how this can happen in makerspaces.

The STEM movement is a recent phenomenon receiving world- wide attention as the darling educational project for school sys- tems and research centres. This interest has no doubt been fuelled by economic rationales of the supposed necessity of STEM for continued material wealth, and the claims that the future will require a different sort of expertise than what we currently pos- sess. However, not as a conservative response, but as a critical one, it is important for us to become clearer about what it is that we would want students to learn. In addition, as researchers and practitioners, it is imperative that we distinguish hype from reality, if only because we need to learn from our collective institutional histories and claim some form of ownership over the direction of our work. Interdisciplinary STEM education does provide opportu- nities for educators to deeply confront such issues as the ethics of invention, and the distinction between the descriptive and norma- tive disciplines. Yet, these gains are likely to be drowned out by the much louder clamour for flashy new things to fill new rooms with rearranged furniture. This commentary is intended as a reminder to the community to do the hard, unglamorous work required to make worthwhile learning happen.

Interest in the Nature of Science (NOS) has not been very significant in the local context, with school textbooks and curriculum documents offering very little in the way of utilising it as a central organising theme in the study of science. At the same time, calls are made to enhance scientific literacy, with no sense of irony over the omission of such a vitally important component. The NOS is deemed important beyond its central place in scientific literacy due to developments in pedagogy. For example, as more teachers adopt constructivist methodologies, there now exists a need to develop a robust defence of science from the philosophical positions undertaken by constructivism; in the face of computing technologies which enables simulations that blur the line between models and reality, we really need to educate learners of the epistemological considerations in developing our models of reality. It is known that teachers' informed NOS views, while being the necessary condition for their ability to engage in the NOS in the classrooms, is not sufficient. Factors like curriculum objectives, pressure to complete and conform to the syllabus, and poor administrative support stand in the way of effective implementation of NOS-rich curriculum in the classroom. For example, extrapolating from a study by Bell, Lederman, and Abd-El-Khalick (2000) in which the pre-service teacher sample subjects reported that preparation for lessons in the NOS took considerable time above normal lesson preparation; if time were not freed from other administrative duties, it would be hard to imagine how teachers could develop their NOS lessons effectively.

At least in the local context, available research paints a rather bleak picture of the situation - the necessary condition is not even achieved. While this study does not find a significant difference from previous studies, it seeks out to remediate a major shortcoming : the previous studies have made use of unvalidated instruments, and were lacking in variety of NOS aspects assessed. In addition, this study extends the data set, providing a richer and more detailed analysis of NOS aspects rather than issuing a blanket pass/fail statement. Some suggestions for teaching and teacher education are also proposed for discussion.