by Kristen Wendell, McDonnell Family Professor in Engineering Education

I’m pleased to have this chance to tell you about the Portable Maker Workshop, a new tool for classroom engineering design from Pre-K to grade 8. At the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach, we are always looking for more ways to support learners in creating functional, testable prototypes of solutions to engineering challenges. Our focus on functionality and testability stems from our “constructionist” (Papert, 1980) view that the construction of public physical artifacts is a productive way to engage learners in disciplinary practices and build conceptual knowledge. In typical Pre-K – 8 classrooms, students’ designing is limited by the available materials, which are often an assortment of craft and found materials. The maker education movement has given rise to one possible solution to this problem: transportable, curated “mobile maker spaces” that contain authentic tools and materials — everything from drills, saws, and PVC to electronics and LEGO bricks — that allow students to create sophisticated, functional prototypes of their engineering designs.

We’ve developed the Portable Maker Workshop as a curated set of materials, tools, and guided inquiry activities on how to use them. For transport between classrooms and between buildings, it packs into two crates that fit into a car’s trunk or backseat. When unpacked in a classroom, it is a well organized and visually inviting rack of containers that feature essential tools and materials for children’s prototyping. These supplies have been carefully selected and intentionally distributed across five categories that design educators at Stanford’s D-School consider essential for any prototyping space (Doorley, 2014; Doorley & Witthoff, 2012): structural items, pliable materials, connectors, utensils, and treasures.  (Our treasures are all materials to make fluid flow!) Currently, two Portable Maker Workshops are housed at the Tufts CEEO. We have two this semester, one is out at a STOMP classroom at Brooks Elementary School in Medford, where two STOMPers are using it for an 8-week long unit on designing rovers to explore ecosystems.  We look forward to providing an update in the late spring about how that unfolds! In the meantime, you can find more information about the Portable Maker Workshop at the Community Based Engineering website: http://www.communityengineering.org