Supporting Fab Lab facilitators to develop pedagogical practices to improve learning in digital fabrication activities

Abstract

Planning and facilitating digital fabrication activities, where students engage in creating tangible artefacts with digital technology, requires knowledge on both technology and pedagogy. Currently, most of the studies see facilitators of digital fabrication activities as technology experts and there are only few studies regarding them as educators. There is not much discussion from the learning sciences point of view, considering what are the requirements to enhance learning in the activities. To fill these research gaps, this paper aims to provide theoretically grounded practical suggestions of how the facilitators may contribute to improve students' learning in digital fabrication activities based on learning science propostions. The aim of this study was to explore, how Fab Lab facilitators and school teachers can design digital fabrication activities to support students' learning. We explored the current practices in Fab Lab Oulu from the two perspectives: considering novice students' learning and scaffolding ill-structured problem-solving. We suggest that the facilitators may improve students' learning by taking into account their background and current learning processes, applying instructional scaffolding, and supporting teachers involvement to take active role in the activities.

Entrepreneurship Education Meets FabLab: Lessons Learned with Teenagers

“…Another key challenge was negotiating the roles and responsibilities between the adult participants of the project (see also [23][24][25]28]) researchers, teachers and FabLab instructors. Researchers strived to provide participating teachers all needed materials beforehand as well as inviting them to take part as much as they can.…”

“…We believe they will be of use to the diverse group of researchers and practitioners coming together in Fab Labs and makerspaces, in and out of school environment, to work with children with an interest to encourage children to adopt the Protagonist role. Prior literature has shown the practitioners form a very diverse group concerning their experience and expertise, some lacking experience in pedagogy, others having very limited background in technology and making [23][24][25]28]. Hence, we expect discussion about potential challenges and associated lessons learned to be valuable.…”

Affective Learning in Digital Education—Case Studies of Social Networking Systems, Games for Learning, and Digital Fabrication

“…Taylor (2016) has concluded that the activities in "makerspaces" can be transformed into classroom projects that match the goals of twenty-first-century education. In other words, the overall learning experience through making can be empowering and can nurture students' creativity and inventiveness among other twenty-first-century skills (Blikstein, 2013;Iwata et al, 2019;Pitkänen et al, 2019).…”

“…This was done to provide research evidence about the design and implementation of digital fabrication activities. In practice, current undertakings in the local Fab Lab were explored from two perspectives: how current practices consider novice students' learning and how facilitators and teachers provide scaffolding in unstructured problem solving (Pitkänen et al, 2019).…”

“…Since then, Fab Lab has arranged different types of digital fabrication activities for school groups. The activities have typically included 2D and 3D design and manufacturing, prototyping with electronics, programming, and utilizing tools and machines to fabricate prototypes (Georgiev et al, 2017;Iwata et al, 2019;Laru et al, 2019;Pitkänen et al, 2019).…”