A few years ago a small team of us at Intel developed an outreach program drawing on the skills and passions of our resident makers, which we called “Start Making!” Our aims were to complement Intel’s ongoing efforts to inspire students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and to attract a more diverse population of youth to consider educational and career pathways in technology.

What Will You Make?

We believe that great numbers of young people out there—some of whom, for one reason or another, do not necessarily self-identify as strong in engineering or design—can and will make major creative contributions toward building our (necessarily technological) future. Furthermore, we believe we must reach those young makers through nontraditional channels. We can open the doors to creative careers in high tech and help minimize the barriers to entry by

• Eliminating the intimidation factors that some students may associate with STEM subjects
• Highlighting the “hooks” that will appeal not only to the mechanically- and mathematically-inclined novice makers, but also to those who are naturally gifted in expression through textile arts, spatial arts, performance arts, music, and so on
• Offering tools that enable immediate success and providing environments that support inclusivity, open learning, and creative exploration

The Maker movement—a recent wave of tech-inspired, do-it-yourself (DIY) innovation—is sweeping the globe. Participants in this movement, known as makers, take advantage of cheap, powerful, easy-to-use tools, as well as easier access to knowledge, capital, and markets, to create new physical objects. This revolutionary change in how hardware is innovated and manufactured has great potential to change the future of computing, particularly for young people from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields: females, racial and ethnic minority groups, and people with disabilities.

By empowering girls and young people from other underrepresented groups to just “Start Making!” we can open the doors to technological innovation (and to the recognition of potential career opportunities in high tech) for a large and extraordinarily talented crowd of young makers who may otherwise be locked out by traditional STEM education programs.

Four years after we started down this path at Intel, we are thrilled to see that Start Making! has grown, matured, and evolved under the expert guidance of The Clubhouse Network team, in collaboration with the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. The original spirit behind the effort to educate a generation of makers has been amplified as more and more creative, talented, local facilitators have customized the program to engage youth from their communities. Through a knowledge-sharing network of almost 100 Clubhouses, The Clubhouse Network is enabling thousands of young people to practice “making” in their daily lives. This book aims to expand that reach and broaden the community of young makers even further by sharing these ideas and approaches.

The Start Making! activities described in this book are undeniably fun; they also present young learners and makers with some of the foundational building blocks for understanding electronics and computing, such as how a circuit works or what it means for a material to be conductive. More importantly, these activities set the stage for beginner makers to do something creative and original with that knowledge. The activities come from the maker community and capture the wonderful spirit of open collaboration, self-directed learning, and fun.

As the name suggests, Start Making! is just the beginning. We now see easy-to-use coding environments and physical computing platforms made widely available, empowering makers of all skill levels to design interactive objects that sense and control the physical world around them.

It is our hope that Start Making! will inspire young learners to keep making—to pick up new tools because they have gained confidence through these activities and know that technology can be a powerful means of creative expression, and that technological devices are not just things you can buy, but things you can learn to build yourself to create a better world.

—Carlos Contreras (Public Affairs Director, Intel)

—Anne McGrath (Program Manager, Intel Foundation)

—Jay Melican (Maker Czar, Intel)