Abstract
It is a distinct privilege to bring this special issue—themed on Maker-Centred Science and Mathematics Education—to our readership. Maker movements can trace their origins to the culture of vocational education in Germany since the 1980s. As these early cultures of making and improvisation diffused to the New World, they manifested in more formalised physical spaces as makerspaces—initiated by local interest-based communities as well as by private enterprise—in many cities across the US. Makers design artefacts that can be applied in daily life—often in creative ways. Many of the interest-based maker communities openly share their ‘making’ process using diverse approaches. That is why many makerspaces have been initiated worldwide as bases from which makers design, create and share. Such phenomena have been described as ‘maker movements’. Concurrently, many researchers of education practice have begun to investigate issues relating to the introduction of the concept of makers within education. The accompanying educational discourse on the concept of makers is rooted in Dewey’s constructivism and its key feature is ‘learning by constructing knowledge through the act of making something shareable’ (Martinez & Stager, 2013, p. 21). This might also be expressed as ‘learning by making’ and/or ‘making for learning’. Over time, the maker concept has been introduced into K-12 systems around the world. In particular, STEM/STEAM education especially emphasises making in terms of the interdisciplinary application of science, technology, engineering, art design and mathematical knowledge, skills and attitudes.
More recently, there has been a somewhat belated recognition of the benefits that might accrue at the intersection of dispositions of making and the enactment of curriculum design. It is the narratives of learning which emerge at this intersection that this special issue is focused on documenting. Sang and Simpson’s (2019) study in this special issue affords the reader with a useful panoptic overview, through their interviews with makers in different regions across the globe. Their work provides valuable contextual understanding to Gu, Xu, and Hong’s (2019) study (also in this special issue)—on the development of a Technological Literacy Survey—is one such example of the very necessary efforts being made at this intersection of learning and making. In turn, this paper provides context for another paper in this special issue, namely that describing the work of Hsu, Lee, Ginting, Smith, and Kraft (2019) on making and scientific argumentation.
At the global scale, the outward-oriented economies and geopolitical contexts of Taiwan, Singapore, Finland and England situate themselves at the confluences of major flows of trade, ideas and innovation among different parts of the world. These are particularly well suited to take advantage of the rise of maker-centred learning, in particular, in science and mathematics. Each is a robust economy committed to investments in education and lifelong learning, as a means to engage human capital. Below, the special cases of maker-centred science and mathematics education in Taiwan, Singapore, Finland and England are briefly introduced.