Purpose: Relatively few studies have examined the perspectives of informal learning facilitators who play key roles in cultivating an equitable learning environment for nondominant youth and families in making and tinkering spaces. This study aims to foreground the perspectives of facilitators and highlight the complexities and tensions that…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand how designers and engineers practice design while Making. Motivated by their roots in constructionist learning principles, Makerspaces are increasingly used as sites to learn design, especially in undergraduate engineering education programs. However, there has been little work on how trained…

Purpose: This study aims to understand how graduate students in a maker education course discuss beliefs about making and implement these beliefs as pedagogy in their curricular designs. Design/methodology/approach: Interview transcripts from seven students were analyzed thematically for conceptions of making and learning. Lesson plans were also…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore how making tabletop board games elicited adolescents' design thinking during their participation in a summer game design camp at their local library. Design/methodology/approach: This study leverages qualitative approaches to coding transcripts of participants' talk. This study uses the design thinking framework…

Purpose: In contrast to traditional portfolio practices that focus on the individual, this paper aims to reenvision portfolio practices to encompass sociocultural aspects of learning by considering how young makers, both in- and out-of-school, imbue digital cultural practices into the documenting and showcasing of their work, as well as observe…

Purpose: The researchers conducted a collective case study to investigate how families engaged in making activities related to aerospace engineering in six pop-up makerspace programs held in libraries and one museum. The purpose of this paper is to support families' engagement in design tasks and engineering thinking, three types of discussion…

Purpose: The rapid emergency remote teaching has moved informal learning programs online including makerspaces, which has created an opportunity for harnessing the benefits of virtual makerspaces. This study reports on findings from three club designers and facilitators' reflections on a fully virtual maker club offered in the summer of 2023. This…

Purpose: In reflective writing, students are encouraged to examine their own setbacks and progress. With a shortage of guidance in how to provide feedback to students on this type of writing, teachers are often left to figure it out on the job. The central hypothesis in this paper is that the lens of reflective practice can help focus teacher…

Purpose: Evaluation of public library makerspaces traditionally examines achievement of library goals, which reflect leaders' and funders' values. Understanding makers' experiences and perspectives may help evaluators frame their inquiry to reflect community values, test assumptions about makers and support democratic and equity-focused aims. This…

Purpose: Using Johansson-Sköldberg "et al."'s (2013) descriptions of design discourses, this study aims to analyze teacher interviews, research notes and teacher and student artifacts to determine if engagement in design practices led to changes in the teacher's thinking. Design/methodology/approach: This article presents results from a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to revisit previous design principles and guidelines for online makerspaces in public libraries (Kim et al., 2020) and expand the design principles with more updated implications and examples from the literature published during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: The authors reviewed…

Purpose: This study aims to uncover divergent collaboration in makerspaces using social network analysis to examine ongoing social relations and sequential data pattern mining to invesitgate temporal changes in social activities. Design/methodology/approach: While there is a significant body of qualitative work on makerspaces, there is a lack of…

Purpose: Many initiatives seek to engage children in maker education. However, there is a paucity of research examining children's engagement in making in low-income formal school settings. Likewise, little work has been done to explore the transformative perspectives of both the children and the people around them. This study aims to explore a…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate design principles for transforming existing making communities of practice within public libraries into online knowledge-building communities to support youths, families with young children and adult members' making and tinkering during COVID-19. Design/methodology/approach: Building upon C4P and connected…