How Maker Teachers Are Cultivated (With Teaching Video)

To this day, students’ learning and real-world applications are often disconnected. It is said that maker education is closely tied to society, but amidst the rapid development in recent years, the concern and controversy that everyone has been harboring is: how should maker teachers grow?

I’ll take myself as an example and recall my personal journey of understanding maker education.

In 2011, I saw many maker spaces in society and began to get in touch with some teaching of Scratch programming software, and I started offering elective courses at school.

In 2012 and 2013, I began participating in a series of activities at maker spaces in Beijing and Shanghai. After immersing myself in the life of makers, I started to realize the educational value of maker spaces and the various projects within them.

Many projects may not have market value, but they are very interesting and reflect the application of many cutting-edge technologies. As a teacher leading students in science and technology innovation competitions, I naturally felt that maker education is related to technology education. Thus, the idea of “let makers nourish makers, let makers enrich education” emerged.

However, just like the process of interacting with a person, one might feel a connection at first, quickly determining a direction, but to truly understand requires some typical events to occur.

However, I am a slow learner. Although by 2013 I could already master Scratch sensor boards proficiently and create some innovative projects on scientific experiments, I was still a novice in the maker realm, and my learning pace was much slower than many teachers.

Starting in 2014, I began learning about Arduino, a commonly used open-source hardware in maker education, because I saw that many maker projects were completed using Arduino. Surprisingly, its price was only a few dozen yuan.

Compared to the thousands of yuan spent on robotics competition equipment, its cost is almost negligible, so I naturally felt that Arduino could become an important teaching tool in information technology education, helping to accomplish the teaching work that robotics could not do well—sensing and control, which are core processes of information technology, thus enhancing our professionalism as information technology teachers.

In this process, I leveraged my background in physics to design a systematic curriculum for Arduino from the component principle level.

Due to the low price of Arduino, I designed an Arduino teaching plan as stationery, meaning that information technology teachers could allow students to bring their own devices to class like bringing a pencil case, and they could use their Arduino at home to complete homework or some ideas that the school couldn’t implement in time. This was the initial idea of the “home maker space incubation course”—to help students build a mini maker space at home through school courses, in conjunction with the school and social maker spaces.

The roadmap of maker space equipment from “large class teaching tools—project teaching aids—regular teaching stationery” has been recognized by many teachers and providers of maker space solutions, which made me very happy, feeling that information technology could finally become a stable foundational course in science and engineering, and information technology teachers could become the main force in teaching the basics of maker education.

However, when I began to think about the reasons behind Arduino’s low price, I realized that maker education is not merely a technical issue, nor just a matter of learning methods or teaching methods, but a question of values and methodology.

The designers of Arduino chose to open-source the circuit design, sharing it so that anyone in the world can produce it according to the same standards and improve it according to their needs, with very small restrictions on the trademark. This allows anyone to join commercial interests, knowledge sharing, and project improvement in their own way. The vast enrichment of virtual solutions, the rapid and dramatic application scenarios, and the global supply chain combined have made Arduino’s design specifications an industry standard, significantly lowering its price.

Open-source and sharing are the core values and methodologies behind maker education. Only by understanding the maker movement at this level can one grasp the immense value of maker education—

It teaches everyone that success can be achieved through sharing rather than possession, that power can be measured by reputation rather than wealth, that project experience can be used to assess qualifications rather than scores and papers, and that happiness can be measured by friends made rather than control over others. This itself is a transformation of life philosophy accompanied by values, and this transformation, when expanded outward, becomes an innovative society, and when returned inward, is a harmonious and comprehensively developed life.

Thus, as a maker teacher, I began to pursue a way of life based on maker values and a methodology of working according to maker principles—this is my path as a maker teacher.

In my view, from the perspective of the curriculum, the growth of maker teachers can be divided into three stages:

Teaching others’ courses, teaching one’s own courses, and dynamically opening courses based on one’s or students’ needs.

First Stage—Teaching Others’ Courses

At this stage, most maker courses are provided as a part of the services offered by companies responsible for building maker spaces. Although this is not entirely reasonable, in the future, there should be specialized course service providers responsible for training, but it can still solve some problems.

Many companies provide detailed teaching materials, lesson plans, micro-videos, and even arrange personnel to teach in schools. However, for schools, this is merely a crutch for entry; the self-growth of teachers responsible for maker spaces is the long-term solution for maker education.

Reflecting on my growth, the tradition of Jing Shan School encouraging teachers to offer distinctive school-based courses is more important than the school spending money to buy any equipment for me. Although there are textbooks for information technology courses, there is no requirement to follow the textbooks entirely; teachers can integrate their understanding of the course into it.

For example, after attending a lecture by Mr. Mitchel Resnick, the head of the Scratch project at the MIT Media Lab, on Scratch and its corresponding interactive media and robotics teaching in 2010, I immediately rearranged my usual information technology course content based on the resources and keywords provided, inserting a Scratch teaching unit. Although I did not yet understand how to teach it, I learned and taught simultaneously, establishing interest groups, allowing students with better programming talent than me to solve problems together with me. These methods later became my fixed practices for learning new content and reflected the educational principle of mutual learning.

Next, I started building QQ groups, joining various QQ groups, searching for like-minded individuals nationwide, solving my own problems while making new friends, and forming a stable set of teaching content. Half a year later, with the help of an editor from a publishing house, the first provincial Scratch textbook was officially published.

I began to enter the second stage—teaching my own materials

Every maker deep down is unwilling to repeat themselves. Years later, as I grew, I rarely taught class by class according to the materials I wrote.

Instead, I improved my teaching content based on new knowledge learned and new problems faced. During this process, I integrated Arduino content, as well as 3D printing and mobile app development content. When I was interested in something but not entirely clear about it, the best approach was to open a new elective course, allowing students and me to research the problem together.

The third stage is when my maker courses transform into a state of spontaneity

If students are interested in sewing, we might make a pillow that can have some lights on it, which naturally connects to wearable technology and smart home— even if I initially just wanted to buy a sewing machine and was unsure how it would relate to maker education, this vague feeling marks the beginning of the spontaneous state.

If students love succulent plants, we could use 3D printing technology to design a flower pot, pairing it with succulent plants for an exhibition, even pricing each pot and opening a micro-store, while also learning how to take photos and write advertisements, thus broadening the teaching content of maker education.

I increasingly feel like a language teacher, where the basic skills of maker education are akin to teaching children how to write, while the various typical projects resemble famous literary works. I enjoy writing poetry and maintaining a blog, experiencing my own spiritual realm, ultimately enabling children to master language and express thoughts.

Therefore, maker teachers should be envied teachers. The second rule of maker teachers is that providing space is more important than providing money; giving teachers the freedom to develop their own courses without excessive disturbance from class hours, teaching plans, and various evaluations is crucial.

Now, there are many platforms for sharing courses. Through sharing, our sense of achievement reaches the second or third level, where we deeply experience the joy of being a teacher— the joy of a free intellectual.

Having gone through many hardships, painful reflections, and responses after expansion, I have finally accepted my shortcomings. I have become more at peace. My educational life is about embodying a way of living, harvesting happiness in life through creation and sharing, which is the ideal state of life for a maker teacher.

Teaching video by Teacher Wu Junjie