Creating science fiction can engage both imagination and scientific reasoning. We offer examples of middle school students building science fiction explanations to justify their decisions during a week-long role-playing game (RPG) design workshop. ...

Designing with cross-domain, cross-role educators leads to innovations more likely to be adopted and sustained. Yet, there are few opportunities and little guidance to do so. We contrast the challenges and successes faced by two teams of members with ...

Making-for-All narratives permeate discourses in education and policy without considering the challenges to implementing programming equitably for all. This paper describes a nascent research collaborative that aims to partner with incarcerated women to ...

The Maker Partnership Program (MPP) is an NSF-supported project that addresses the critical need for models of professional development (PD) and support that help elementary-level science teachers integrate computer science and computational thinking (...

In recent years, there has been increased attention on promoting access to computer science among all students. Our study seeks to address the underrepresentation of racially minoritized youth in computer science by offering a culturally responsive ...

Engineers---often characterized as paragons of problem solving---are typically ill-prepared to adequately address social and environmental challenges as a result of their narrow focus on the technical dimensions of their work. In this paper we present ...

We report on a late-breaking project that centralizes the Maker practice of loom-based weaving as a locus for unplugged computational thinking. While unplugged activities are appealing for making computation accessible, they also come with the risk of ...

Innokas Network works with schools and other stakeholders to develop 21st Century Competences in education. In this work we present a maker pilot study in which Innokas Network introduced Finnish teachers to the Innovation Process and the Micro:bit ...

We observed how 102 children (7-12 years old), from four different countries (U.S.A, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden), imagine smart devices and toys of the future and how they perceive current AI technologies. Children outside of U.S.A were overall more ...

This paper examines tensions present in school-based makerspaces. We argue that, as maker education grows, particular attention needs to be paid to social interactions and discourses, in addition to space design, equipment, and curricula. We report the ...

While much research focused on making emphasizes digital and tangible media, few studies have explored making with biology, or biomaking, where people use cells as fabrication units to grow or "make" desired materials for designing real world ...

Emotions can greatly influence the learning process. This paper presents EmoForm, a lesson based retrospective self-report tool for capturing children's emotion changes over time during Design Based Learning (DBL). So far, emotions have received little ...

Maker activities have a strong focus on creating artifacts as a rich context for learning but offer few opportunities for student makers to articulate and reflect on their acts of learning and making. Yet beyond artifact creation, acts of communication ...