Around the world, children and teens are becoming engaged in making. They are designing light-up cards for family and friends, building machines that draw, programming musical instruments, and creating their own toys using recycled parts. In the process of designing projects, they are learning new ways to solve problems, communicate ideas, and collaborate with others.

This guide provides ideas and activities that you can use to help young people start making. In this guide, we share Start Making!—a program that has engaged hundreds of youth in the process of designing their own projects.

This Start Making! guide offers a series of creative do-it-yourself (DIY) projects that introduce young people to the basics of circuitry, coding, crafting, and engineering. Starter project activities lead into Open Make sessions during which young people work on personalized projects, both on their own and in small groups. Through the process of designing and making projects, young people build confidence, camaraderie, and curiosity about science, technology, art, engineering, and math concepts.

Start Making! consists of a series of activity sessions that you can adapt to your situation. You can offer your own version of Start Making! activities in your home, at the library, at an after-school club, at the local community center, or anywhere else young people can gather to work on projects together. You can dip into the activities once a week, run them as a week-long summer activity, or go through them in any way that works for you and your group.

We developed the Start Making! program within The Clubhouse Network, a global network of community-based centers where youth create projects based on their interests using a variety of tools and technologies. Facilitators provide support and model the process of making projects. Throughout this guide, we share examples of Start Making! projects and experiences from Clubhouse youth (ages 10 to 15) and facilitators around the world. You can learn more about Clubhouses on pages 185–187.

We encourage you to take these ideas and make them your own. We hope this guide will help you create more opportunities for young people to start making projects together. By offering your own Start Making! program, you can inspire young people in your community to develop creative ideas, learn new skills, and share their creations.

What Is Making?

We define making as the process of creating projects based on your ideas and interests. We encourage a playful and curious approach to the process.

The making activities we share in this book bridge concepts and techniques from art, crafts, music, and design with science, technology, engineering, and math—an integration of ideas referred to by some educators as STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math), suggesting the power of this integration for motivating learning. The projects mix familiar materials (such as paper, fabric, and recycled materials) with new conductive and programmable materials (such as LEDs, conductive thread, and microcontrollers). We have found that more young people become interested in science and technology concepts when the concepts are applied to making projects that integrate art, music, and design.

Who Is a Maker?

We believe everyone has the potential to be a maker: to be inspired to imagine, create, and share personally meaningful projects. The Start Making! program is designed to help young people begin to identify themselves as makers. We recognize that young people are much more likely to see themselves as makers when they feel part of a creative community.

Guiding Principles

Start Making! is based on four guiding principles. These principles grew out of research by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, and they form the core of the Clubhouse learning model.

1. Principle 1: Support learning through design experiences. The Start Making! program is based on the idea that people learn best when they are engaged in creating personally meaningful products. As young people work on projects, they can be seen as engaging in a design process, which we call a “creative learning spiral” (see the following image). In this process, they imagine what they want to do, create a project based on their ideas, play with alternatives, share their ideas and creations with others, and reflect on their experiences—all of which lead them to imagine new ideas and new projects. As youth engage in these experiences, they learn valuable technical skills while also learning about the process of design and invention.
2. Principle 2: Help youth build their interests. When young people care about what they are working on, they are willing to work longer and harder, and they learn more in the process. In Start Making! facilitators help young people gain experience with self-directed learning, providing support for youth to recognize, trust, develop, and deepen their own interests and talents. Many youth begin by mimicking a sample project, then work on variations on the theme, and soon develop their own personal path, stemming from their personal interests.
3. Principle 3: Develop a sense of community. Start Making! is also designed to develop a learning community in which youth share ideas and work together on projects. Facilitators play an important role not just in supporting youth, but also by modeling the process of making and learning themselves.
4. Principle 4: Foster an environment of respect and trust. In Start Making! programs, young people are treated with trust and respect—and are expected to treat others the same way. Start Making! facilitators strive to create an environment in which participants feel safe to experiment, explore, and innovate.

Goals of Start Making!

Start Making! is designed to encourage young people to develop their own ideas, to experiment, and to innovate. Teaching young people the activities themselves is not the primary goal. Rather, the goal is to enable young people to develop their own projects and to foster motivation and confidence in their ability to learn.

By offering Start Making! you can help young people develop creative competencies. Here are the five key competencies that we identified as outcomes for young people who participate in Start Making!

1. Identify as a creator or maker. Young people develop positive attitudes toward creating hands-on projects.
2. Develop confidence in creative expression. Young people feel capable of bringing their ideas to life by designing, experimenting, iterating, and persisting through failures.
3. Acquire technical tool literacy. Young people become familiar with a variety of tools and technologies that they can use to make projects.
4. Become aware of STEAM. Young people become aware of ideas and concepts that bridge science, technology, engineering, art, and math and demonstrate curiosity to learn more.
5. Learn collaboration and networking skills. Young people actively engage in collaborating and helping others.

   

   

An evaluation of the Start Making! program in Clubhouses showed that young people gained confidence and experience in each of these five areas. (To learn more, see the evaluation report by Julie Remold of SRI International at bit.ly/start-making-evaluation-report).

How Do I Design My Own Start Making! Program?

The Start Making! program consists of a series of sessions that you can adapt to your local context. For example, you can offer it as a full-day camp over the course of a week, or as an after-school program that meets for two to three hours each session.

The first six sessions introduce new tools and techniques through starter projects. Each of these sessions includes Open Make time, during which young people apply what they’ve learned to create personalized projects. These core sessions lead into a final Open Make session in which the makers spend time preparing a final project. The program culminates in a showcase where they share their projects with family, friends, and other community members.

The projects and activities in the first six sessions help makers understand simple concepts and then dive deeper into more complex ideas. Over the course of multiple sessions, young makers learn to develop new ideas, persist through setbacks, collaborate with others, and make meaningful projects.

Here’s a brief description of each session:

1. Session 1. Light It Up: Paper Circuits Introduces basic circuits through making light-up cards and other creations using LEDs and copper tape applied to paper.
2. Session 2. Make It Sing: Programmable Musical Creations Introduces physical computing and programming through the process of making interactive musical instruments using Scratch and the MaKey MaKey invention kit.
3. Session 3. Paint with Light: Illuminated Wands and Photography Introduces light painting using LEDs and delayed-exposure photography.
4. Session 4. Give It Form: 3D Forms Introduces three-dimensional spatial design through the process of creating a digital sculpted character.
5. Session 5. Change the Move: Art-Making Bots Introduces reverse engineering and remixing by deconstructing a toothbrush or other simple device to build art-making robots.
6. Session 6. Sew the Circuits: E-Textiles Introduces e-textiles by designing a sewable project, such as a bracelet, pin, or flag, using a preprogrammed LilyTiny board.
7. Session 7. Final Open Make: Personalized Projects Encourages young people to develop projects, individually or in groups, based on their personal interests, applying techniques explored in earlier sessions.
8. Session 8. Show and Share: Community Showcase Provides a showcase in which young people can share their projects and process, celebrating their accomplishments with family and friends.

You can offer all of the six core sessions or choose the ones you think will work best for your group. After the core sessions, provide Open Make time for preparing final projects. Then, collaborate with young people to organize a community event for project sharing.

Your Role as a Facilitator

As a facilitator, your role is to create a welcoming environment in which people feel encouraged to imagine new ideas and bring them to life through creative hands-on explorations. Rather than directly instructing, your focus as a facilitator is on providing a safe and inviting space in which makers can experiment and learn from their own explorations.

We suggest finding others who can join you to help facilitate your Start Making! program as volunteers or staff. We’ve found the most important qualities for facilitators are an interest in working with young people and a passion for making and learning themselves.