Maker Education

Another interesting attempt to make education interesting has been termed as Maker Education. Dale Dougherty had coined this term around 2013. Dale has made the Maker movement into a global movement. His company Maker Maker movement promotes the development of new devices as well as tinkering with the existing stuff. You can think of it as cross over of Do It Yourself (DIY) attitude and electronic hardware. Dale’s magazine MAKE has been instrumental in making the term maker movement very famous.

I personally associate maker activities with not only hardware but also software and content. Whenever somebody is creating something whether it’s hardware, software or content he or she is a maker.

People who make are often referred to as ‘makers’ in maker movement. Makers generally want a place to meet and use tools which are sometimes not available at home. This kind of place is often referred to as a Makerspace.

Although people can make using any thing some things have become very famous within the maker education community around the world. Some of the them are :

• Arduino
• Raspberry Pi
• Scratch

Arduino is an open-source platform used for building electronics projects. Arduino consists of both a physical programmable circuit board (often referred to as a micro-controller) and a piece of software, or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that runs on your computer, used to write and upload computer code to the physical board.

I had learned a little bit about Arduino while travelling to the US in 2015. I had even bought an Arduino but did not do anything with it for more than an year since I thought Arduino is for hardware engineers and I had background all my life in software not hardware.

One day in 2016 my 6 year old son got hold of that Arduino and asked me how it worked. I showed him how I could light an LED using it. He got so fascinated with it that he started tinkering with it. He stopped seeing cartoons on YouTube and instead started seeing Arduino related YouTube videos. Along with him I also started learning Arduino. Sometimes when I could not guide him he found a video on YouTube and showed it to me. Interestingly he learned a lot of spellings and vocabulary in process of doing searches on YouTube.

My first tryst with maker education came when one day my wife told me that she was trying to make him learn spellings for 4 days and he was not able to learn them. She complaint that he was just not motivated to learn those spellings. I had an idea. I told him that if he types all the spellings in Arduino IDE (Software used to program Arduino) then an LED will light up if the spellings were correct. He was not very conversant with typing but still knew about computer typing since he had learned a little bit of typing in school. I made a small program where if he entered all his spellings in a particular place in code the LED would light up.

He focused all his energy and started typing. He reached a state of flow. He typed all 15 spellings and ran the program and then that LED lit up! He was very happy. My wife asked him the spelling verbally and he seemed to remember them.

Next day the big day arrived when he had to give the dictation test in school. He got a star from the teacher for remembering all spellings and suddenly my wife and my mother became fans of maker education. That day my wife told me that I was a genius in teaching kids! It’s always a great feeling when your wife is happy with you.

Slowly both of us started learning about Arduino and electronics. Companions can help a lot in learning. I had found my companion to learn hardware — a 6 year old kid — my son! He was generally better in finding stuff and I obviously better at understanding deeper concepts. Sometimes I used to stuck at a certain issue due to mental roadblock which my son solved. Once me and my son were trying to build a mobile controlled bluetooth enabled toy car project.

I had worked on a bluetooth module years ago with a client of mine who was building a portable mobile connected ECG machine. He was an engineer from prestigious IIT Delhi who had deep expertise in medical devices. I remembered how difficult it was in those days to program bluetooth modules. I had written India’s first book on mobile application development and was the only person with knowledge which the client could afford. So we both experimented with various bluetooth modules. It was also my first experience in hardware. We tried to control the bluetooth module with a Nokia phone using Java ME.

I still remember the countless hours which me and my client spent controlling that bluetooth module. I told my son that controlling bluetooth module was not a child’s play. My IITian client had difficulty in helping me program it. How can we both do it? My son unfazed by my apprehensions found a YouTube video explaining the HC-05 bluetooth module. HC-05 is a Bluetooth module which can be attached to Arduino and which can help connect it with both Android phones. I suddenly found that the process was not very difficult. Over the years Bluetooth integration had become simpler. In the end I ordered HC-05 from Amazon. Then when it finally came we were super excited to experiment with it. Finally the moment we had been waiting for arrived. We were able to control a toy car using an Android phone.

The father (who had not much experience in electronic hardware) and son (6 years old at that time) team had finally made a breakthrough! We had done what first year students learn while doing electronics engineering. This is the power of maker culture. Education is a good byproduct of maker activities.

My son learned the value of persistence in this episode. Before maker activities he was very hot headed. Even while playing games he never wanted to follow any rules which he did not like. All these were bad behaviours which maker activities converted into good behaviours. Now his ‘never follow the rules which are against you mindset’ got converted into persistence. He had to struggle hours to make a toy car or toy light.

He got better in communication. Some of the hot headed nature was due to his inability to explain. Now he could explain things better. Spellings and vocabulary obviously got better with YouTube and Google search.

When I shared my sons videos with my friends they were amazed. Some of them said genius’s son is also genius. I always believed him to be an ordinary child. I had seen him stuck on matters for hours. So he was really not that genius who just thought something and made it at one go. What really was happening was that he had entered the flow state.

As a parent I was helping him by providing some parts and guidance. He learnt the art of getting budgets passed. He saw YouTube video then tracked the name of the part and then tried to find it on Amazon. When I came from office he was ready with the URL of the video and the Amazon page or the part name. He then tried to convince me to order it. One day I saw that the parts we were ordering from Amazon were very cheap when compared to imported robotics kits available in the market. Also my son stopped demanding toys. He found happiness in his own creations. Thus it was not more expensive than what he would have ordered in form of toys had he not been building these kinds of electronic stuff.

Without my help my son would not have been able to build things like mobile phone controlled cars but frankly my own time involvement was very low. I was just spending 30 to 60 minutes with him a day for 3–4 days to build such a project. The value I was providing could be easily explained by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s work on Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). I will write more about it in the next blog post.

I have founded an open education project called Fun2Do Labs. To know more about it visit : http://fun2dolabs.org . Subscribe to me on Medium to read my posts on education and technology.