Collaborative Research: Identifying the Interplay of Expertise Development, Creativity, and Learning in University Makerspaces

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Makerspaces are collaborative and open work environments which are becoming increasingly popular on university campuses. As students work in makerspaces they traverse and integrate a wide variety of skills that create a dynamic relationship between the learning processes, creative exploration, and expertise acquisition. This work provides an initial examination of this interplay between learning and expertise. It begins to answer the question of what and how students learn in university makerspaces. At present, it is unclear what university students actually learn in university makerspaces and how this compares with other hands-on learning opportunities such as competition team projects, undergraduate research, or similar experiences. Educators hope makerspaces are effective learning environments that can 1) enhance lifelong and self-directed learning skills, 2) expand engineering curricula, and 3) motivate while simultaneously educating the next generation of STEM students. However, there are few studies on the development of expertise and learning or their impact on creativity in makerspaces because these spaces are complex, dynamic, non-standard environments that provoke unprecedented challenges when it comes to their study. In addition, most work on expertise and creativity compares novices and experts but fails to create detailed accounts of how one moves from novice to expert nor how this transition influences the ability to be creative within the domain. Most studies of expertise are comparison studies or simply snapshot of groups at certain points in time. These studies overlook the development of expertise. In makerspaces, students are often motivated by an idea to make a creative project, and in turn they thereby develop expertise and undergo learning. This learning that takes place in makerspaces is natural, organic, and uncontrolled. This study of makerspaces will examine these phenomena as they naturally occur, rather than altering the environment to conform to a typical controlled experiment. This approach enables the study of the evolution of making as engineering makers mature and evolve on two different campuses.This study will focus on two very different makerspaces at two different universities. Both spaces feature many of the commonly found making equipment (e.g., 3D printers, electronics equipment, wood and metal working equipment, etc.), but each has its own unique culture and placement into the programs at their respective universities. Further, the differences between the universities create a unique opportunity for comparison. To study the makerspaces at these two universities, the following methodological procedures will be used: 1) ethnographic observation in making activities, and 2) observations and interviews with student groups and individual students who are making in the engineering makerspaces. This work is also envisioned as a springboard for future studies in understanding makerspaces including makerspace culture, barriers and pathways to entry, tensions produced in the space, student design processes, innovative approaches, and collaborative efforts.