Designing a Meaningful STEM Makerspace

After doing a lot of professional development with Strawbees and community facilitated discussions with educators, Peter finds it useful to ask educators to construct a representation of something with Strawbees. Using concepts like “belonging” or “curiosity” helps teachers build something relatively quickly and it unlocks so much more.

“When you construct a representation of an assessment, for example, it sounds crazy but it allows assumptions that people have about assessments to be surfaced and made visual. Then we can talk about it and negotiate with it.”

When implementing a different activity like sewing, Peter finds that because some people can be more experienced with it than others, it can create some anxiety for some people who have never done it before and worried about being compared to the experts in the room, but Strawbees flattens out the expertise field because what people create is not perfect, but can be improved upon. And the responses he usually gets from teachers come in two flavors: “This is amazing” and “Why haven’t I seen this before?”

“I can’t even think of a time where somebody complained about it or anything like that. They always say it’s amazing. I love to see that when somebody’s new to Strawbees they lay out all of the connectors and they’re exploring what the potential is before they even try to construct something.”

Supporting teacher’s real obstacles with time constraints is also something that Peter appreciates. After meeting with a teacher that only has students for 30 minutes once every eight days, they have to decide whether they want to build a one off lesson for the short amount of time or do something over the span of several weeks that students may not understand.

“I think Strawbees lends itself to a short amount of time for engagement. It’s hard to put students in the driver’s seat with big equipment because they might not know how to use it. That takes some extra instructional time which they can do but it is extra.”

The benefit Peter has with maker spaces is that he can design activities that fulfill values that he has such as creativity, collaboration, troubleshooting and problem solving. Supporting students or learners to engage in those values with a host of materials is usually part of his goal in building a space.

“Maybe this is a bias of mine, but I think too often digitally based tools involve having to learn the tool itself as part of the tasks. Materials like Strawbees don’t confuse the educator or the learner. Making something on a 3D printer involves learning how to string up the filament and when there’s such an emphasis on tools, the design kind of gets lost.”

Maker spaces also allow for intergenerational learning which is a gold standard, especially in museums, between caregivers, grandparents and children. Because of Strawbee’s low threshold of adoption, it doesn’t remind other generations of negative school experiences. When he’s seen generations engage with activities like circuit blocks and boards, caregivers might think they need experience with wiring and might feel disengaged.

“Strawbees doesn’t have stereotypes associated with it of what is good and bad like with particular memories from school. I think something like Strawbees works because straws are both familiar and novel. It creates an opportunity for caregivers and children to work together which I think is cool.”