homemade “squishy circuit dough” to
make electrified sculptures. They can
create wearable projects by sewing
the machine-washable Lilypad Arduino into fabric. And with the MaKey
MaKey, they can turn Play-Doh into
a keyboard and mouse, create a drum
set out of bananas or a piano out of the
school’s stairs, and control a Power-Point presentation with a croissant.
Computer programming. Every child
needs experience programming computers, and not just for their future
careers. This important skill plays a
major role in many other disciplines,
and it can give students control over
their increasingly technological world.
Computer programming even prepares
students to be better citizens in an age
dominated by debates over privacy, intellectual property, polling, and investment in the computer-based modeling
that’s central to scientific inquiry.
Advocacy events like the Hour of
Code represent progress, but the truth
is, an hour of anything is insufficient.
Programming is a skill developed over
long periods of time. It is like learning
to write, paint, or dance. You become
a better programmer by programming, and access to a teacher with
expertise doesn’t hurt.
A Maker Option for School Computing
The ed tech community is engaged in
a seemingly endless battle over what
device provides the most bang for
your district’s buck—laptops, iPads,
or Chromebooks. Yet there is now another option: microcomputers.
Eben Upton was a computer sci-
ence professor at Cambridge when he
grew concerned that computer science
majors had little experience making
things with computers. He imagined
producing a computer so inexpensive
that universities could give it away to
potential students and ask them to
show what they made with it when
they visited campus for the interview.
This idea gave birth to the Raspberry
Pi, a baseball-card-sized $35 Linux
computer with USB, composite video,
Ethernet, and HDMI ports.
Unlike a microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi is a complete computer. You
can use it to program microcontrollers
or interface with them. Connect an
old keyboard, mouse, and display,
and you’re all set to run OpenOffice,
Scratch, and other software. You can
use it to power your home entertainment system, or you can ask a fifth
grader to build a Minecraft server
with it. New hardware, like the Arduino Yun and Intel Galileo, combine
both computer and microcontroller in
the same small package.
Makerspaces for All
Classrooms should embrace the joyful
approach of Maker Faires by creating
space for kids to engage in complex,
personally meaningful projects. But
some schools seem more willing to
spend a lot of money building special
makerspaces or fablabs (fabrication
labs) to house professional-grade
hardware than they are to change
classroom practice. The lessons from
three decades of computer labs should
dissuade us from building a special
bunker that kids visit once a week.
This is not to say that you should not
have a killer makerspace filled with
state-of-the-art technology, proper
ventilation, and comfy working condi-
tions. But you should keep in mind
that every classroom can be a maker-
space where kids have the materials,
time, flexibility, and support to learn
by doing. Educators need to create
space for making in their heads as well
as in their classrooms.
They also need to drop any pre-
conceived biases about who can be a
maker. The range of potential projects
and constructions available to mak-
ers supports a diversity of activities,
genders, and learning styles. When
presented with multiple activity cen-
ters featuring a variety of materials,
boys may gravitate to Arduino and
girls to wearable computing/e-textiles.
Both activities require engineering,
circuitry, microcontroller program-
ming, and debugging, and although
there may be surface differences in the
product, the process is the same. For
example, the Flora wearable micro-
controller system includes a sewable
GPS element that lets your clothing
determine your location. Designing a
shirt or necklace that warns you of an
approaching friend or arrival at your
favorite classroom may include more
complex engineering and computing
challenges than your standard robot-
ics competition, and it may appeal to
children who would otherwise miss
out on such learning opportunities.
Our colleague, Sylvia Todd, age
12, has done as much as anyone to
inspire girls to engage in engineering
projects through her popular website,
Super Awesome Sylvia’s Super Awesome Maker Show ( makershow.com;
see Student Profile, L&L, December/
January 2013–14). Millions of viewers
have learned about the joy and power
of making from her since she produced
her first video at age 8. Scratch (scratch.
mit.edu) users have also shared more
than 4 million projects online—a testament to the creativity of kids.
Much of what is presented as school
technology is concerned with doing
work more efficiently. But when educators embrace a more expansive view
of computing, provide access to a variety of high- and low-tech construction
materials, and encourage choice in
project selection, a larger population
The maker movement treats children as if they were competent.
Too many schools do not.
