Makerspaces in Academic Education: An Exploratory Analysis and Design Framework

Since its beginning, the Maker Movement has gained momentum in educational settings due to its constructionist nature. Makerspaces localize learning to use (digital) manufacturing tools to design and implement a project of individual interest. Development processes are highly interactive and iterative, due to maker communication and focused knowledge sharing. Consequently, learners not only benefit from the provided infrastructure for making, but also from the way how individual learning processes can be designed when individual and collective capacity building are intertwined. In this paper, we investigate (i) in how far existing learning experiences in Makerspace settings have been utilized in academic education, and (ii) whether these experiences could be utilized in a structured way for academic course design on digital production. We show, besides the lack of frameworks in the literature on how to relate academic course designs with making, how a university course on digital production techniques can be enriched with Makerspace experiences for the benefits of constructionist learning support.