Abstract
Makerspaces and the availability of digital maker tools offer opportunities to create with their hands. Makerspaces and making have increasingly found their ways into institutions of formal and informal education but have yet not been explored in entrepreneurship education. Maker education holds the premise that learners work in a self-regulated and interdisciplinary way and develop a mind-set that enhances their self-organisation and self-efficacy. In the context of a European project, an educational programme, which combined maker and entrepreneurial education for fostering entrepreneurial thinking, skills and attitudes, was developed. This paper aims to understand and evaluate the direct effect of this maker educational programme on the development of non-cognitive (entrepreneurial) skills and attitudes, i.e. in relation to self-efficacy and creativity, as core elements of an “entrepreneurial spirit”. A creativity drawing test as well as a self-efficacy questionnaire were used to evaluate the maker educational programme and to measure individual effects on study participants. The analysis of the results shows a positive effect at the individual level in both creativity and self-efficacy when taking age and gender differences into account. A better understanding of the relationship between age as well as location specific settings and the resulting benefits in creativity and self-efficacy would be a worthwhile follow up research.
Highlights
IntroductionThe European project DOIT (Entrepreneurial skills for young social innovators in an open digital world) was a 3-year project (from October 2017 to September 2020) with 13 partner organisations from 10 different European countries
Since the foundation of the first makerspace at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2012 (Dougherty, 2012), the number of workshops which offer access to digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printers and laser cutters have been steadily growing
Coming back to the research questions, we can affirmatively answer research question 1 and 2, i.e. whether the programme has an immediate impact on the creative development and self-efficacy respectively: The DOIT pilot did increase the creativity and self-efficacy of the participants at a statistically significant level
Summary
The European project DOIT (Entrepreneurial skills for young social innovators in an open digital world) was a 3-year project (from October 2017 to September 2020) with 13 partner organisations from 10 different European countries It aimed to develop and test an early entrepreneurial education programme for children combining maker and entrepreneurial elements and social innovation (in the sense that innovations are being developed for the greater good addressing Sustainable Development Goals as defined by the UN (SDGs)) (Rosa, 2017). The DOIT programme was not oriented towards a commercial definition of entrepreneurship education, but rather, it worked on the basis of the more comprehensive definition provided by the EC thematic working group as cited above, which recognises entrepreneurship education as learners developing the skills and mind-set to be able to turn creative ideas into entrepreneurial action (Eurydice, 2016). As this paper aims to understand and analyse the impact of the DOIT maker and entrepreneurial education programme on the participating students in developing non-cognitive skills, the following research questions guided the study:. This is line with studies on self-efficacy which shows that children tend to have higher self-efficacy scores until they reach around grade 7,
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