Make: Three Modes of Making: Designing Purposeful Projects to Teach Maker Skills

The Maker movement has been an excellent opportunity for people to become producers rather than just consumers, and schools are recognizing the value of offering students the tools, materials, and skills necessary to design sophisticated and meaningful projects. But teaching technical skills should not be the end goal: At its best, a Maker education teaches students to think and act in creative ways that can be applied to difficult challenges in all areas of life.

Three Modes of Making provides a framework for Maker courses in upper grades that teach students creative-process skills through three key Maker modes: Imitation, Modification, and Innovation. Educators will learn the differences between the three Maker modes, their associated skill sets, and gain concrete methods to teach, document, and assess these skills. Through this approach, teachers will enable students to apply them to different creative needs.

By focusing on how to teach skill development rather than merely how to build specific objects, Three Modes of Making enables students to improve and enhance their creative skills, and learn ways to apply them to a wide variety of challenges. This book is a road map to developing the creative problem solvers that the world needs for the future.