This individual papers session, ”Maker Movement”, will include the following:
Joystick Designs: Middle School Youth Crafting of Game Controllers
While there are many tools for making games, most of these have focused on screen designs leaving aside the potentially rich space of designing tangible game interfaces for learning. This paper reports on the outcomes of a workshop with middle school youth who created game controllers with MaKey MaKey, a tangible construction kit, to interface with their remixed Scratch games. The analyses focus on the design of game interfaces and program codes and indicate that youth mostly replicated common controller designs but varied in their attention to either functionality or aesthetics. An unexpected finding was how these different approaches followed traditional gender lines, with girls more focused on aesthetics and boys more focused on functionality. This pattern was to some extent replicated in the remixes of the Scratch games. In the discussion we address the pedagogical and technological opportunities and challenges of tangible game making for learning.
Veena Vasudevan, Richard Davis, Eunkyoung Lee, Yasmin Kafai
Learning From The Making In Makerspaces
Tinkerers and makers around the globe are meeting and collaborating in makerspaces to create, hack, and innovate with various tools and technologies. Since makerspaces are a new learning environment, there has, thus far, been no study or analysis of how they work, how people participate and what they learn, or why they are so appealing. In this paper, we present preliminary findings of some of the first empirical research on the Maker movement and makerspaces as learning environments. Specifically, we offer two working frameworks for understanding the learning that happens in makerspaces. Given the lack of current research of learning in makerspaces, these offer potentially significant contributions to our understanding of learning more broadly.
Erica Halverson, Kim Sheridan, Lisa Brahms, Breanne Litts, Trevor Owens
Sector67: Making Things and Breaking Things
Chris Meyer
Erica Halverson, Discussant