Why the Maker Movement May be Just What Public Education Needs

The maker movement is an entire subculture that is currently on the rise in North America, and is characterized by extreme pushes to do-it-yourself. The hundreds of people who have begun to participate in this nationwide movement have one motto: if you want something, make it. Because I enjoy working with my hands and several of my hobbies have a building or making component to them, I had been following the growing movement long before I discovered it was seeping into public education.

Then, when I fully realized all the vast potential for innovation in education that the maker movement held, I was filled with excitement and nostalgic longing. Longing for a world of learning I had found in my basement and carved out of my information-hungry lifestyle, but was never given to me in my many years of education. It reminded me of all those who were close to me that had struggled so hard in public education, and of all the time they spent trying to care about school. I believe that maker-style classes could’ve helped them. 

 

Photo Credit: NASA flickr

Allowing students to participate in the maker movement in schools could unlock a door that leads to the infinite potential of human creativity, and what lies beyond that door is an experience personalized for the student, by they student. 

And yet, the maker subculture in education comes off more like a parent’s, teacher’s, administrator’s, and politician’s worst nightmare. 

Current maker movement involvement in education has resulted in children being told to play with fire, entire classes of fourth graders running free with legos, and hundreds of after-school programs where students are given the resources to make things. Make what, you say? It really doesn’t matter. 

And that’s where the fear springs from. Every class or school that really adopts the maker philosophy must drop the illusion that they have complete control of what their students learn. And when you stop think about it, that really is scary. If we put 3D printers in classrooms, could someone make a 3D-printed gun? In theory, yes. But in practice it's nothing like that. With the freedom to make there is a potential for students who are given control of their own curriculum to choose to learn bomb-making over calculus, although that’s assuming there are no safety nets or limitations in place

However, it’s not the fear-inducing aspect of the maker movement that gets me excited. It’s the idea that the process whereby I have been learning my entire life could potentially be implemented in schools. I’m talking about Autodidacticism. 

The maker movement provides the first truly viable method for allowing students to teach themselves.

Let me illustrate a maker approach to learning, hopefully it will add context to the situation.

First, a student—currently it’s usually a student of life rather than a student of a certain institution—must choose something to make. Students presented with this wide opportunity for creativity tend to stick to the conventional—something they know—but it is important to step slightly out of one’s comfort zone. Otherwise no learning happens. Let’s imagine for a moment that our example student (a true child of the nineties) decides he wants a Rocketeer rocket pack. This student will immediately find that there is a laundry list of skills and knowledge that he yet lacks in order to make his item, not the least of which is some geometry, and maybe even some calculus. One thig for sure, there is no more asking, "When will I ever use this?"

Now the student has a reason to learn, and it was born out of his or her choice. Nothing is forced on them.

In the research and learning phase of the build, the student will no-doubt find out that they are but one of a whole community of people who just have to have that Rocketeer jetpack. The student will find and connect with more people with interests and passions just like him or her.

And here’s the greatest part: it never ends. When you make something yourself, you know all of the faults and all of the flaws; you have a natural motivation to make more; and the process always helps you identify what you are truly passionate about. Some students in this scenario would abandon the jetpack halfway through because they would find that they would rather build a computer or write software, which then sucks them into the fascinating world of robotics; Some students will find themselves unsatisfied with the prop, and will use their fabricating skills to create an actual one-man flying machine; and others still will be completely satisfied with their jetpack creations and move on to more items from film and pop-culture to fuel their craze for nostalgia and fandom. 

The maker subculture welcomes them all. 

If only more schools could welcome this type of learning, I think they would find that more students could maintain interest and become engaged in their education, and more students would recognize the journey that learning represents, and the marvelous places it can take you.

Post a comment with your thoughts or questions. Thanks for reading!

An Example of a Gamefied Ethics and Values Course

Because of the prolific amount of writing and research I have been doing on gamification recently, I decided gamifying a public schooling course would be a good exercise in testing the boundaries, limitations, and even some of the strengths of the approach. And just to make the exercise as educational as possible, I chose to design an college-level ethics and values course.

So, why an Ethics course?

The answer is quite simple really, a college-level Ethics course hits my 3 major requirement for this exercise: (1) It is a commonly required course that a lot of people have taken before; (2) it challenges the criticism of gamification’s ability to improve knowledge-based courses (i.e. gamification is belived to only be effective with skill-based courses and not academic or philosophical courses), and (3) that it assesses whether or not gamification can be applied to advanced (college-level) courses and higher-level learning.

That having been said, let me quickly describe my college ethics and values class (hereto referred to as the Old Model):

We met three times a week for class “discussion” and lecture. 90% of the class interactions were lecture, and only occasionally was anything opened up to discussion. Then, at the end of the semester, we were required to turn in a 15-page paper on whether or not civil disobedience could be morally or ethically justified. Yep, that was it.

And so, with the painful memory of the Old Model fresh in my mind, I set out to see if gamification could really change this dusty and decrepit educational model into a more effective course.
 

Photo Credit: Flickr User WCN247 via Creative Commons

First, I had a conversation with an ethics professor that I had a closer relationship with, in order to gain a more intimate knowledge of the essential message and objective of your standard college-level ethics course, and how it could be approached from various angles. Interestingly enough, I learned that Ethics 101 is a course designed to help students realize that decisions carry consequences, so many of which cannot be immediately felt or understood in order to help the student realize that they should probably adopt some type of ethical code of conduct to improve the well-being of other people around them and to prevent their life decisions from sabotaging future progression, improvement, and happiness of both the individual and the human family. Which is about when the realization hit me like a ton of bricks: Fable. 

 For those of you who may not be entirely entrenched in video game culture, Fable was a game released in 2004 where the choices of the player impacted how others reacted and (in part) how the entire video game progressed. That is to say, the style of haircut you choose for your character would affect how the people he was around treated him, and while it certainly was not the first game to explore the consequences of decisions, it was the one that came to mind when I thought of “gamifying” my ethics and values course.

So with that background as a springboard, I went about reinventing the standard, college-level ethics and values course.

And, after about four-or-so more hours of careful consideration and design, this is what my Ethics and Values course looked like:

1.       Lecture and Discussion (Once a week): While I tried my best to do so, ultimately eliminating the lecture altogether seemed damaging to the course as a whole. This allows the professor to ensure that the proper tools for completing the course are being delivered equally to each student. However, I would make the following improvement to the lecture:

a.       meet much less frequently

b.      facilitate discussion by allowing students to text in sensitive answers and thoughts as well as vocalize them, and post the running response board at the front of the classroom so that all involved can see, thus further pushing an atmosphere of discussion.

2.       Small group discussions (Once a week): For this portion of the course, 3-5 students meet virtually with the guidance of a teacher’s assistant to systematically face 4 narrative scenarios requiring them to make an ethical or moral judgment, and the teacher’s assistant chooses one scenario at random for which the consequences of the students’ collective decision (within the narrative scenario) become permanent. These consequences (loss of limb, intense fear of heights, etc.) are then recorded and held by the student for future use.

3.       Personal Decision Navigation (Once a Week): For homework, the students are required to face a series of five narrative scenarios, presented to them as a text word problem, describing an ethical or moral dilemma, wherein they must provide a decision of action, write 3 paragraphs defending their decision, and then receive the consequences (assigned to them by their peers) for each of those decisions and have them recorded for future use in the final assignment)

4.       Final paper (last week of class): Each student must write a final paper, thoroughly exploring how the consequences of all previous decisions (even those made by the group) would affect them in major life events and decisions, such as marriage, parenthood, or career. This paper is completed with the assistance of a teacher’s assistant, and demonstrates whether or not the student has gained the proper understanding of consequences as they relate to ethics and values.

It became clear to me while designing this course (of which this is just a summary) that gamification had a lot to offer even the most ambiguous and abstract of courses, if each change was carefully evaluated and assessed along the way. One of the major pitfalls that I encountered again and again was my own internal desire to turn education into a game at the cost of the education. My own desire to make education sexier continually got the better of me, and I was forced to re-evaluate and change my course design again.

How do you think I did? Leave comments and criticism of my “gamified” course in the comment section below.

The Benefits of Gamification in Academics

In one of my previous blog posts, I talked a lot about the obstacles that face gamification in the education system. However, I think it’s very important that we take a step back and acknowledge the things that gamification stands a good chance to improve—because it turns out gamification really can do a lot for instruction and learning. In this article, I set out to discover what gamification does well, when it is properly implemented, and compare it to the traditional lecture paradigm. I’ve learned that gamification is definitely not a cure-all for the education system, but it sure stands a good chance to make a difference when people use it to better education, rather than just making education more like video games. 

Some of the greatest contributions to the education that could come from gamification include:

• boosting student motivation
• encouraging social interaction between students
• transitioning courses to the mastery model
• pushing education forward and exiting the current paradigm

and these are all benefits besides the obvious—giving children a greater chance to enjoy their education. Let’s not forget that gamification provides both the ability to improve educational outcomes, curriculum, and courses, AND the ability to make education accessible and interesting for those who are driven to learn. Sure, there will always be students who are motivated just by the fact that they want the knowledge and learning excites them, but should those students be punished by the chloroform-laced history courses I had to take? Of course, making education fun is not the central goal of gamification, but let’s be all the more happy that it is one of the side-effects of this approach.

Let’s take a moment to look at the listed benefits of gamification one by one.

In my article about the obstacles of gamification, I mentioned the misconceptions about motivation as one of the major drawbacks to game-ifying the educational system. However, with those misconceptions aside, gamification itself does do a lot to help students maintain interest and motivation to do well on a course. Is this motivation rock-solid and will it make math as addictive as World of Warcraft? Of course not. Can we expect these boosts in motivation to fix our graduation rate and help all of our apathetic students to begin caring? Again, the answer is no. But anyone who works with students in the education system (teachers, tutors, parents, etc.) can tell you that when it comes to keeping students motivated to achieve, every bit of help makes a difference. Anything we can do to help students hang in there, to not give up and continue to work towards bettering themselves, is not effort wasted. 

Second, games are often inherently social, while traditional education rarely is. So many video games mean nothing if there is only one participant, and those games often have different players in varying roles. However, in a normal lecture there are only two roles, and one type of interaction—students and teachers, with the students being taught by the teachers. Students are taught knowledge or skills individual in the classroom, and the level of that skill and knowledge is tested individually, when in the post-education world, very few of those people will exist in a bubble. Students of science may join research teams, students of marketing will join marketing teams, etc. And on top of all that, students tend to learn better in situations that have relativelylong-term, social consequences.

Another thing that games do really well, but education seems to be struggling with, is applying the mastery model for learning. The mastery model involves the instruction of skills and concepts one at a time, and requiring mastery before one can continue to learn. The greatest advantage to this type of learning is simple—you don’t build on weak foundations. For example, I had some friends in middle school that loved to play Mortal Kombat. They memorized list after list of meaningless combinations (A, B, B, A, A, etc.) so that they could execute moves in the game that would help them move forward. 

I have now attained a Level 43 mastery of grammar and punctuation

Now, coming from an educator, that’s some serious learning that one could  never expect from a traditionally educated student. And why did they invest the time and mental power to master these combos? Two simple answers: they could not move on in the game until they had (and they really wanted to move on in that game) and those combos were presented as challenges that could be overcome with practice. When one is not in the mastery model, there is less accountability to learn something because you know you will have more chances later, and there is less sense of accomplishment, because you have no concept of what opportunities mastering a concept can “unlock” for you. For some reason, every day video games excel at teaching millions of people meaningless and extremely esoteric information and skills (like Mortal Kombat Combos and RPG skill trees), but the education system can’t get those same people to figure out how to properly use a comma.

If education could require students to systematically learn concepts, and bar them from progression until they mastered those concepts, courses would not have to be taught twice (I took the same history course 4 times, it just had a different name each time) and students wouldn’t be pushed into advanced courses when they had not mastered the basics—a very common problem in the current education system. I’ll speak more about the mastery model of learning in a later post.

Finally, and I can’t iterate this enough, while gamification is not exactly where education needs to be, and it doesn’t solve all of the many problems that the system, the teachers, students, parents, and administrators face, it is closer to that ideal than where we are now. Just the fact that gamification is starting to break the classroom lecture paradigm, and helping people realize that there are other options, and that innovation in education is both possible and necessary, is a bounding leap towards the ideal. If gamification did nothing to the education system but help those involved shake things up, it would be worth every penny spent. 

Gamification really does facillitate and improve learning, but do the costs outweigh the payoff?  Several other models for learning improvement exist, and have been shown to be effective, and several ideas for improving education that have nothing to do with learning models have also been proposed. Do you think gamification has anything unique to add to education? Do you think it's a valuable model to emply in public education?

A good criticism of gamification in the education system

http://digitaldebris.eu/digital-debris/2011/12/31/the-irony-of-gamification-written-for-ied-magazine.html

Innovation in Edcuation

The Classroom of the Future: We don't Know What it will be Like?

In a conference I recently attended, there was an interesting topic introduced by members of the United States Department of Education: We don’t know how to train the teachers of tomorrow because we don’t know what the classroom of tomorrow will look like. 

Maybe like this?

Teaching is one of the oldest and most revered professions, have people recently really found a way to change it so dramatically that we don’t know how to train teachers anymore?

Well, actually the answer is yes. And technology and standardization are at the center of the debate.

Technology is rewriting the way people think about learning. Instead of viewing knowledge as something one person has that must be transferred to another person, suddenly knowledge can be approached independent of the minds that used to house it. This is mostly because housing information is what computers were invented to do in the first place.

MIT has been recording their courses since 2001, and currently has a database of educational material (from one of the world’s top universities I might add) that spans over 2000 courses. ItunesU, an Apple-based educational platform, has over 2,400 courses available and is growing in educational content daily.

The current push for educational content is to have one unified system, one place where all knowledge can be stored and accessed. You know, like Wikipedia. (please detect the sarcasm...)

But technology isn’t just changing the classroom by replacing textbooks with a single-source knowledge bank, technology is changing how we deliver that learning as well. Video-based online learning, text-based online learning, adaptive computer course, self-paced computer courses, and a slew of other delivery options exist as alternatives to the standard classroom lecture. Some people even think that by the year 2050, there won’t be any classrooms and there will be no need for lectures.

But like I said, technology is only half of the changes that the teachers of the future are facing.

The debate surrounding the standardization of education is fundamentally a question of whether we use resources (teachers, districts, parents, technology, etc.) to make sure that every student is receiving an education of equal quality, something that might be observed if every student watched the same video lecture, or if every student needs an individualized education that cannot be adequately measured or tracked, something that might be observed if every student were given a set of wooden blocks and told to make whatever they wanted. While these represent the two extremes, they adequately introduce the sides of the debate and the problems faced by both sides. 

"Best. schoolday. ever!"

And all of this is why the Department of Education is worried that future teachers who are currently in school will find themselves in the same boat as the computer science majors: their education will be outdated by the time they’re done getting it.

With so much in flux right now, it is difficult to know what future teachers will have to face. Will they become tutors for students that take courses provided by a central database? Will they be responsible for incorporating media, software, and other technologies into a social classroom experience? Will teachers even exist, or will they be completely replaced by instructional designers (designers of online or computer-based learning that does not require a teacher)? Or will their profession remain unchanged, preserved by its strong roots in tradition and the expectation of previous generations (“I want my child to have the kind of education I had.”)?

With all these possibilities, what will the classroom of tomorrow look like? My prediction is that in the future we will only see more division, maybe even to the point that the education system becomes a competitive market.

The teachers I have had the opportunity to interact with (yes, even the older ones) are happy for new methods and future changes, as long as we can find a way to help them do their job, and ultimately improve the lives of the next generation.

What do you think? What is the future of the American classroom? Is teaching a dying profession?

Leave a comment with your thoughts.