Interaction Order and Historical Body Shaping Children’s Making Projects—A Literature Review

Norouzi Norouzi,Iivari Iivari,Kinnula Kinnula

doi:10.3390/mti3040071

Abstract

The importance of familiarizing children with the Maker Movement, Makerspaces and Maker mindset has been acknowledged. In this literature review, we examine the complex social action of children, aged from 7 to 17 (K-12), engaging in technology Making activities as it is seen in the extant literature. The included papers contain empirical data from actual digital Making workshops and diverse research projects with children, conducted in both formal and non-formal/informal settings, such as schools or museums, libraries, Fab Labs and other makerspaces. We utilized the theoretical lens of nexus analysis and its concepts of interaction order and historical body, and as a result of our analysis, we report best practices and helping and hindering factors. Two gaps in the current knowledge were identified: (1) the current research focuses on success stories instead of challenges in the working, and, (2) histories of the participants and interaction between them are very rarely in the focus of the existing studies or reported in detail, even though they significantly affect what happens and what is possible to happen in Making sessions.

Highlights

The importance of familiarizing children with the Maker Movement, Makerspaces and Maker mindset has been recognized recently [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
We have structured our findings in two main sections: the ones related to interaction order between the actors and the ones related to historical bodies of different actors
The first teacher-related challenge that we identified in these studies, is regarding teachers being pushed in the direction of confusion in assessing children’s learnings in the scope of digital fabrication and Making process [7,16]

Summary

Introduction

The importance of familiarizing children with the Maker Movement, Makerspaces and Maker mindset has been recognized recently [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Making truly enables democratizing innovation: ordinary people are given the access and opportunity to innovate, design, engineer, and program (digitally enhanced, physical) tools by themselves and for themselves. This has become possible with the emergence of affordable cutting-edge digital fabrication and physical computing technology [1,11,31,32]. Non-formal: at institution out of school, usually supportive, structured, usually prearranged, motivation may be extrinsic but it is typically more intrinsic, usually voluntary, may be guide or teacher-led, learning is usually not evaluated, typically non-sequential. We considered an activity non-formal if it was: held at school, not graded/evaluated, not part of the curriculum, voluntary, and structured

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