There is growing interest in the engineering education community in making and the Maker Movement as a context for young people to learn and develop interest around design and early engineering competencies. Although some researchers argue that making has the potential to serve a liberating and anti-oppressive function in education, there are deep and abiding concerns that making as it exists today is not serving the goals of equity, but is in fact reproducing patterns of inequality in access and participation. In this paper, we consider an educational innovation we designed to create a more equitable maker learning experience for high school aged youth. We designed our innovation around a core pedagogical commitment to meeting youth “where they are”. We mean this in three senses: First, we mean this literally/geographically, as youth need physical access to resources to learn. We addressed this goal by creating a mobile makerspace. Second, we mean this cognitively, as new knowledge must be built on existing knowledge. We addressed this goal by creating flexible project structures with “just-in-time” teaching. Third, we mean this affectively, so that we meet students as who they are. We addressed this goal primarily by giving youth the freedom to make choices about their project work, in what they worked on, in how they wanted it to look, and in who their audience or client for the work would be. The paper describes the design of the mobile workshop and the pedagogical approach and offers two cases of educational programs implementing these models, one from an out-of-school context and one from an in-school context.
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