Make: Three Modes of Making: Designing Purposeful Projects to Teach Maker Skills 21243

The Maker movement has been an excellent opportunity for people to become producers rather than just consumers, and schools are recognizing the value of offering students the tools, materials, and skills necessary to design sophisticated and meaningful projects. But teaching technical skills should not be the end goal: At its best, a Maker education teaches students to think and act in creative ways that can be applied to difficult challenges in all areas of life.

Three Modes of Making provides a framework for Maker courses in upper grades that teach students creative-process skills through three key Maker modes: Imitation, Modification, and Innovation. Educators will learn the differences between the three Maker modes, their associated skill sets, and gain concrete methods to teach, document, and assess these skills. Through this approach, teachers will enable students to apply them to different creative needs.

By focusing on how to teach skill development rather than merely how to build specific objects, Three Modes of Making enables students to improve and enhance their creative skills, and learn ways to apply them to a wide variety of challenges. This book is a road map to developing the creative problem solvers that the world needs for the future.

About the Author

Matt Zigler is a teacher, artist, and maker. He is currently the Bullis Innovation and Technology Lab (BITlab) Coordinator at Bullis School in Potomac, Maryland, where he works with students and teachers to bring design thinking and the Maker process into traditional content area classes, teach Maker related classes, and oversees a state of the art Makerspace and Fab Lab. Matt has presented on how to design and build a Makerspace that meets the needs of specific schools, how to create a culture of Making and innovation, and how to develop Maker programming for all levels of ability, K-12. Matt holds an MFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA.

DALE DOUGHERTY believes that all of us are makers and he is a champion of the people and projects that form the Maker Movement. He founded Make: magazine in 2005, and first used the term "makers" to describe people who enjoyed "hands-on" work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. He is President of Make Community, LLC, which produces Make: magazine and Maker Faire.