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Digital Fabrication as a Tool for Teaching High-School Students STEM at the University

Published: 27 June 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In the current paper is documented an ongoing education program designed at FabLab Madrid CEU (the Digital Fabrication Laboratory based at CEU University's Institute of Technology) to teach high-school students STEM in a university environment through digital fabrication technologies. Inspired by the ideas of Neil Gershenfeld and Paulo Blikstein, we are using digital fabrication as a learning tool through which we attempt to create a working educational environment to improve the motivation of the students to finish their pre-college studies and to start a career at the university. All the pedagogies that we are exploring though the programs are based on Seymour Papert concepts related to the use of technology as a building material, the need of a "learning by doing" approach, the importance of learning to learn to keep learning or the benefits of enjoying while learning.

References

[1]
Neil Gershenfeld. 2005. Fab. The Coming Revolution on your Desktop. Basic Books, NY.
[2]
Neil Gershenfeld. 2012. "How to Make Almost Anything. The Digital Fabrication Revolution". Foreign Affairs, 91/ 6, Council in Foreign Relations, NY.
[3]
Paulo Blikstein. 2013. Digital Fabrication and "Making" in Education: The Democratization of Invention. In FabLabs. J. Walter-Herrmann & C. Büching (Eds.), Bielefeld: Transcript Publishers.
[4]
Halverson, E. R., & Sheridan, K. 2014. The maker movement in education. Harvard Educational Review, 84(4).
[5]
S. L. Martinez & G. S. Stager 2013. Invent to learn: Making, tinkering, and engineering in the classroom. Constructing modern knowledge Press.
[6]
R. Q. Berry, G. Bull, C. Browning, C. D. Thomas, G. Starkweather & J. Aylor. 2010. Use of digital fabrication to incorporate engineering design principles in elementary mathematics education. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 10(2).
[7]
S. Tesconi S. & L. Arias. 2014. Making as a Tool to Competence-based School Programming. Fab Learn Conference Paper, Online resource. Retrieved January 2017 from: http://fablearn.eu/2014/wpcontent/uploads/fablearn14_submission_161.pdf
[8]
Seymour Papert. 2000. What's the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power. IBM Systems Journal, v. 39.
[9]
Jon Ord. 2012. John Dewey and Experiential Learning: Developing the theory of youth work. Youth & Policy 108
[10]
Seymour Papert. 1980. Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. Basic Books, NY.
[11]
Seymour Papert. 2005. Teaching Children Thinking. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 5(3). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

Cited By

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  • (2022)Uncovering Children's Situated Design Capital – A Nexus Analytic InquiryProceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3501712.3529732(408-421)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2022
  • (2021)Making Sense of 3D Modelling and 3D Printing Activities of Young PeopleProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445139(1-16)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
  • (2021)Two decades in the making: A scoping review on research on digital making and its potential for digital empowerment in non-formal settingsJournal of Research on Technology in Education10.1080/15391523.2021.197498755:3(459-476)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2021
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  1. Digital Fabrication as a Tool for Teaching High-School Students STEM at the University

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IDC '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children
    June 2017
    808 pages
    ISBN:9781450349215
    DOI:10.1145/3078072
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 27 June 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. design
    2. education
    3. fablab
    4. fabrication
    5. high-school students
    6. university

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    IDC '17
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    IDC '17: Interaction Design and Children
    June 27 - 30, 2017
    California, Stanford, USA

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    IDC '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 25 of 118 submissions, 21%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 172 of 578 submissions, 30%

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    June 23 - 26, 2025
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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2022)Uncovering Children's Situated Design Capital – A Nexus Analytic InquiryProceedings of the 21st Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3501712.3529732(408-421)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2022
    • (2021)Making Sense of 3D Modelling and 3D Printing Activities of Young PeopleProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445139(1-16)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
    • (2021)Two decades in the making: A scoping review on research on digital making and its potential for digital empowerment in non-formal settingsJournal of Research on Technology in Education10.1080/15391523.2021.197498755:3(459-476)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2021
    • (2019)Interaction Order and Historical Body Shaping Children’s Making Projects—A Literature ReviewMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti30400713:4(71)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2019
    • (2019)Fab:UNIverse - Makerspaces, Fab Labs and Lab Managers in AcademiaProceedings of the FabLearn Europe 2019 Conference10.1145/3335055.3335074(1-2)Online publication date: 28-May-2019
    • (2019)Developing new approaches to equitable education for a growing diversity of students at the universityProceedings of FabLearn 201910.1145/3311890.3311913(148-151)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2019
    • (2018)Evaluating Learning with Tangible and Virtual Representations of Archaeological ArtifactsProceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3173225.3173260(626-637)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2018

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