Throughout my experiences of both the re-skilling classes and the writing, I couldn’t help but feel a slight sense of guilt. It all felt a little too obvious. I kept imagining a conversation with my grandfather and telling him that I—at 27 years old—had come to the realization that I should start “making” things. That I wanted a career and life that were full of meaningful work that I could touch at the end of every day.

He would have been so confused. For him, that would have been a silly, naive statement. Everyone works with their hands; that was the way to make a living. And if it wasn’t the direct source of income, it was still a commonplace part of life to build, maintain, and create the tools you needed around the house. It wasn’t a “movement” for their generation; it was just the way things worked.

I don’t blame my father or mother, either. They are each makers in their own right. They learned skills and recipes and resilience from their parents, and they always took the time to explain how different things worked. I don’t think the generational drop-off in manual literacy happened because of any specific generation or at any exact moment. It was a slow and subtle slide backward. Driven by convenience and a glut of consumable entertainment, the DIY ethos was slowly replaced by DIFM (Do-It-For-Me). It’s taken a growing subculture to point out the problems, reinvent the tools to fit within twenty-first-century culture, and articulate the value of taking creative control of technology.

But does it really matter? What happens when a child (or an entire generation) grows up without making?

It’s tough to know for sure, but some researchers and educators are starting to connect the dots on the importance of childhood making. One of the leading voices in this field of study is AnnMarie Thomas. AnnMarie is an associate professor in the School of Engineering and the Opus College of Business at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. More important, though, AnnMarie is a maker. She grew up playing in her parents’ woodshop, taking things apart and trying to make all her own toys. She went on to study engineering at MIT and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and eventually ended up at her current post at St. Thomas. As a professor of mechanical engineering, she began to notice that more and more of her incoming students, even though they were studying engineering, hadn’t built anything themselves or even taken anything apart, for that matter. Concerned about this trend, and with young daughters of her own at that time, she began to look further into the issue. She began conducting interviews with makers she knew, such as professional engineers and inventors, asking about their experiences in their formative years. She did extensive research into the childhoods of other famous inventors, looking for the early signs of making. Nearly everywhere she looked, she found it. Great innovations and inventions were almost always correlated with a childhood that had access to tools and making experiences.

AnnMarie hypothesizes in a transcript of her 2010 TED talk:

We can think of this as an experiment: What happens to our culture of innovation if we stop introducing kids to the art of making things? We wouldn’t expect a musician to be successful if they were only taught theory and then not handed an instrument until college. The same holds true for making. You’d be surprised at how many engineering students colleges see who have never really built anything.

So why are kids making less? Is there not time in the school day for industrial arts class? Are we afraid to let kids build? In a world where some schools have banned recess as being too fraught with peril it’s perhaps unsurprising that the concept of kids working with sharp blades and tools could cause concern. But are kids really so incompetent that we must keep them away from real tools?

One of my favorite school examples comes from the turn of the last century when educator John Dewey founded the Chicago Laboratory School, which had a strong emphasis on learning by doing. Children studied the manual arts at every level of their education. Dewey championed the need for children to be allowed to build real things, with real tools. Thus, when the kids decided they wanted to build a playhouse, they got some advice from teachers and did it themselves. A two-story playhouse, custom furniture, complete with the appropriate building permits, designed and built by children under the age of 14. Jump forward 100 years and we have a generation of kids, many of whom may never be taught how to make things with their own hands. I’m not suggesting that we give a two-year-old a chainsaw (mine still has a plastic tool set), but that we acknowledge that, like playing an instrument, making is a skill which takes years to develop and is best started early.

It might be years until we have the data and metrics to validate the importance of making in childhood, but many of us don’t think it’s worth waiting. If you spend time at any Maker Faire across the country, the most inspiring sight is all the kids lighting up with curiosity and engagement. With our underwater robot exhibit, we can’t pull the kids off the machines. With us there to encourage them to take it apart, we find they actually become more interested in the devices and usually ask us great questions about materials and construction techniques.

It doesn’t take a study or report to convince me that’s important. AnnMarie feels the same way. That’s why she, along with Dale Dougherty and others, has worked to create the Maker Education Initiative, a diverse contingent of educators who are working to bring making back into schools. They’re not just trying to reintroduce the shop classes that have been lost; they’re also introducing many new digital fabrication and maker design skills.

Bringing making back into middle schools and high schools—whether by preserving shop classes or introducing new maker curricula—is only one aspect of preparing the next generation of makers and inventors. In numerous other ways, making is taking back its rightful place in childhood. From iPad apps that encourage making to family-centric makerspaces, the landscape for kid makers is rapidly improving. As a parent or role model, help amplify the maker spirit inside your child (even as you rekindle the spark yourself).

Setting a Good Example

When I asked George Dyson, author and builder of classic Aleutian kayaks called baidarkas, what drives a person to want to build one of his kayak kits, he had an interesting response. Over the years, he’s met dozens of people who’ve expressed interest in the kayaks, some of whom have extensive kayak experience and others who had never been on the water. For years, George tried to find the commonalities between those who actually built the baidarka and those who just talked about it. In the end, he found that it had little to do with experience or education level, but that everyone who finished the project had some sort of role model who had shown them the joy of making.

His insight seemed straightforward and profound. Maybe it was that simple: we just need to set a good example. To dig deeper, I sought out one of the foremost experts in being a good maker role model: Gever Tulley. Gever spent most of his early career working in technology, specifically software development. He knew he was lucky. He had been able to create an interesting life for himself because of his ability to make things. When he thought back on his life and career, he realized that his current situation could be attributed to specific educational opportunities he was afforded, not just formal education. In fact, he thought, it was the informal learning that had been the most instrumental—the freedom and encouragement to break things, to see how things worked, the space to make his own things.

He worried that today’s prepackaged and warning-label-filled childhoods were no longer creating those opportunities, so in 2005 he created the Tinkering School, a summer program designed to teach kids how to explore and build their own things. He was straightforward about his approach, promising to put power tools in the hands of capable 8-year-olds. His approach was unorthodox, but it worked. Hundreds of kids have now passed through the program, and they’ve built everything from roller coasters (with more than 100 feet of track) to three-story treehouses.

Of course, that all sounds dangerous, and it actually is! But Gever found that danger could be a tool. He theorized that, through controlled and careful experiments with danger, kids could learn the true value of safety as well as develop the creative confidence they needed to succeed on future projects. Danger was so important (and so vilified), he thought, that it was worth writing an entire book about the idea. The product, 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) (NAL Trade, 2011), was a hit, and his TED talk about the topic has been viewed more than 1.8 million times. Quite an unorthodox idea worth spreading.

His success with the Tinkering School eventually grew beyond just a summer camp. Gever went on to start the Brightworks School in San Francisco. Brightworks encompasses ideas similar to those of the Tinkering School, but it spreads them over an entire academic year. The goal is the same: to inspire kids with what Gever calls “tenacity.” He thinks tenacity is the distinguishing characteristic between an idea and reality, the bridge between conception and inception. And that’s hard. Gever explained:

The default behavior is to stop working when things get hard. But at a young enough age, you can teach them that working hard is fun.

When I visited Brightworks to talk to Gever, everything about this mentality was extremely visible. The projects glued to the walls and the entire layout of the high-ceilinged space looked like they had been created by a 10-year-old. And they had! The students actually design and build the environment they want to learn in, so it’s not surprising that the design looks more like a tree fort than it does a classroom. But the most noticeable sight is the energy of all the kids. The entire environment is designed for engagement and experience, and that’s exactly what’s happening. The first time I went to Brightworks, one of the students came right up to me to show me his dry ice experiment and warned me not to touch it. This was not like my school experience.

When I told Gever about George Dyson’s theory regarding maker role models, he agreed. That was the same realization he had reached. Children whose parents gave them tools to build with, or who involved their kids in home repairs, were the same children who had no fear of failure. He said the parents of Brightworks students fell into two camps: makers who understood the value of childhood tinkering, and parents who wanted to reverse the trend of DIFM and saw the same gaping hole in manual literacy that I did. Regardless of which group the parents came from, or how skilled they were as makers themselves, it was the commitment to setting the example for their kids that mattered.

It Takes a Village (Making a Kid-Friendly Makerspace)

Tara Tiger Brown was no stranger to making. As a technologist, Tara was used to making something from nothing. She had started a women-in-tech group in Los Angeles and was regularly meeting with other women and tinkering with different projects. She was no stranger to the hackerspace idea, either. Her husband had started Crash Space in Los Angeles, one of the early pioneering spaces of its kind. She had spent time at hackerspaces around the world learning the ins and outs of what made a successful space and thriving hacker/maker community.

When it came to making and building a community, she knew what she was doing. But as soon as she became a mother, she realized she needed to start asking different questions. All of the learning and tinkering she was doing at Crash Space (and even at home) wasn’t suited for children and, in many cases, wasn’t even a safe environment for them. She started to wonder about her son’s future. How was he going to learn? How could he have access to the same unstructured tinkering opportunities that had been so valuable for her? What were other parents doing about this?

She wrote a blog post explaining her thoughts on creating a kid-friendly makerspace, a dedicated space equipped with all the trappings of a traditional makerspace—3D printers, laser cutters, etc.—but with all of the safety precautions of a kindergarten classroom. It wasn’t an entirely novel idea. There were disparate resources for kid- and family-centric making in the LA area. Museums, for example, were putting together kids’ days that involved different types of making. There had even been a few events that included kids at Crash Space, but it was always a challenge to find a venue for these family-friendly activities. Tara theorized that if there were a dedicated space, more events would happen.

Not surprisingly, her blog post resonated with a number of other parents (and nonparents as well). A small group of them began meeting every two weeks to work on planning and organizing. They also continued to host events at other venues, including one with over 100 people turning out for a “learn to code” event and a liquid nitrogen ice cream social.

The meetings and planning continued. Some people stopped coming, some new folks showed up, and Tara and the core team kept the ball rolling. One of the regular meeting attendees was Sharon Ann Lee, who had been working on the redesign and creative placemaking at the LA Mart in downtown Los Angeles. In particular, she was focused on developing the eleventh floor of the large building into a creative space. There were plans for a media lab, artists’ studios, an industrial design lab, and a co-working space. It seemed like a good potential home for the makerspace the group was working on, so they started hosting their events at the LA Mart.

After months of planning, meeting, and organizing, the group decided to take the project to the next level by improving and moving into the space full-time. So they did what any maker project does when it needs to catalyze a community: they put the project on Kickstarter. Over the monthlong campaign, they blew past their initial goal of $15,000, raising more than $34,000. It was enough to buy the laser cutters and 3D printers they wanted to equip the space with, in addition to extra funds to hire staff to supervise during open project time on Saturdays and Sundays.

Now the LA Makerspace is up and running, hosting weekly events and engaging kids and families in making projects of all shapes and sizes. There is a kid-friendly makerspace where there previously hadn’t been.

For those of you who are interested in creating a similar type of makerspace, here are some tips and suggestions that Tara mentioned or alluded to:

1. Tap the existing maker community. Odds are, you’re not alone in your desire to provide your kids with a broader making experience. A great way to find co-conspirators is to tap your local hackerspaces, libraries, museums, and even schools. Send out an email to a mailing list, or set up an initial meetup. Tapping the local maker community is a great way to gauge interest as well as learn what resources might already be available to you.
2. Have regular planning meetings, and be consistent. Tara told me that the process from initial meeting to actually having the space was four to five months, which is a lot faster than most makerspaces come together (due to lots of planning and logistical work that ends up taking time).
3. The key for their group was the planning meetings. As people became busy with other projects, or new people wanted to join, the consistency of the meetings was the backbone. It became something the community could rely on. Consistency is key.
4. Make it kid-friendly, not kid-only. The LA Makerspace team was really conscious of not wanting the space to become just a daycare facility. They went to considerable lengths to ensure that the space was kid-friendly, but not kid-only.
5. One rule: Anyone under 13 needs a parent to accompany them. That rule draws a pretty clear line in terms of what the space will become. In the LA team’s case, it’s created an environment where families are coming to work on projects together, but also avoids the daycare environment that might discourage a maker without kids who wants to work on a specific project.
6. Make it a team effort. Tara couldn’t do it alone. As was discussed in Chapter 4, “Access to Tools,” a makerspace is only as successful as the community that enlivens it. Aside from the administrative work of organizing, the actual class and content creation becomes a tremendous amount of work. It takes a committed and passionate group to make it all work.
7. One rule: Each of the board members of the LA Makerspace is expected to teach a class or be a mentor during open project time on a regular basis. This sets the tone for the entire community that everyone is responsible for making the space excellent—not just through care of equipment, but through creation of classes and community engagement.

Digital Natives

Do you remember the first time you saw a toddler playing with an iPhone, iPad, or other tablet device? I’m certain you had the same reaction I did: amazement. Watching how naturally they move around the digital surface always shocks me. It’s impossible to see that scene and not think about the future—how these children are growing up with computing devices, not as endlessly improving objects to buy, but as extensions of their own capabilities. They’re not going to have to get used to being connected to the Internet all the time; that’s going to be second nature.

Of course, it’s impossible to know how raising such digital natives will turn out (and it’s not hard to see some potential risks). But as far as creating more makers goes, this fact of life can’t be ignored. If making more makers is really the goal, it should be embraced (especially with this new maker world being so DIT-centric). One team is building an app that blends all of this: creativity, making, and sharing.

It’s like the Boy or Girl Scouts for the iPad generation.

There are a suite of skills, such as Animator, Bike Mechanic, Instrument Maker, and so forth, and each contains a series of challenges that the youngster can attempt. After the challenge is completed, a photo is taken of the project and uploaded to the young maker’s portfolio to be shared with other kid makers.

DIY.org was founded by friends Isaiah Saxon, Zach Klein, Darren Rabinovitch, and Andrew Sliwinski. Each one of them brought something unique to the table: Isaiah and Darren were experienced animators and designers, Zach had started and run a successful web startup, and Andrew was an all-around maker and software developer. After meeting at a conference, the team realized their overlapping passion for helping encourage the next generation of makers and decided to throw in together.

The diversity of interests and passion of the founding team can be seen throughout the app experience. It’s a panoply of creativity. They’re not just focused on the maker skills we’ve talked about in this book, either. A look through the blog turns up projects that range from snowshoes made from orange crates to solar-powered cockroach robots, making potato pancakes to building Rube Goldberg machines. And there’s a reason they put “nOOb” next to “beekeeping” and “shoemaking.” The goal of DIY is to universally recognize creativity.

As Isaiah Saxon explained it to me:

There’s an age window, between five and eight years old, when you’re stepping into your identity. You’re establishing your creative confidence… or not. If you develop that confidence, you’ll be able to try new things. It inspires a courage to face fear. A fear of not knowing, fear of failure, or a fear of not being good enough. After they get a skills badge, my hope is that we’ve taken that fear away. There’s more leverage the earlier you develop these skills.

Their game-like process of attempting challenges and earning skill patches turns creativity and making into a playful exploration of their surroundings. It’s fully engaging. And, of course, because they’re encouraging kids to share on the Internet, they’ve made privacy paramount. Instead of posting as themselves, kids choose one of several animal characters to use.

In addition to providing a playful way for kids to develop their creative confidence, DIY.org is equipping them with the most important maker skill of all: sharing. As each challenge is completed, the young maker uploads the pictures to their portfolio, which can be viewed by their parents and family members as well as serve as inspiration for other kids. In the same vein that makers everywhere are re-skilling themselves, the young DIYers will be fluent in sharing and creating collaboratively with their peers.

The more I listened to Isaiah, Andrew, and the team describe their motivation for building the app, the more I realized how important their work is. They’re helping to give the next generation the creative foundation they’re going to need to thrive in this new maker world. Perhaps more important, they’re giving parents an easy-to-use resource to help them push their youngsters in a maker direction.

My generation grew up with Saturday morning cartoons. My kids will grow up with Saturday morning making.

CAD for Kids

For me, one of the more challenging aspects of re-skilling has been trying to improve my CAD skills. I’ve taken numerous classes on Autodesk Inventor, and I’ve played around with all of the free tools like Autodesk 123D or SketchUp. At this point, I can pretty safely create an object that I want to 3D print or CNC, but I’m still nowhere close to being a CAD master. I’ve become adept at shortcuts like finding and modifying a part from Thingiverse rather than speeding through and creating my own design. I stumble around. Parts get made, but it’s always a tenuous process. When I watch Eric breeze through a new creation on Inventor, it’s very clear to me that I have a lot to learn and many hours of practice ahead of me, which is fine.

For kids, learning CAD doesn’t need to be so complicated. Just as kids who learn languages at a young age have an easier time, so it goes with CAD.

Chris Anderson shared an anecdote about his son learning CAD on Google Plus:

Today I mentioned to my 10-year-old that our CNC machine would soon be up and running. He asked what a CNC could do, and I said one example would be to carve a battlefield out of stiff foam for Warhammer figures.

That got his attention ;-) He wanted to know how to tell the CNC what to do. I explained a bit about CAD, and showed him Tinkercad, giving the example of one cube that you could stretch and change.

Then I got busy with something else and left him to figure out Tinkercad himself. I came back an hour later and was amazed to see what he’d designed. A 10-year-old. No training. One hour.

The green stuff we’re going to CNC out of a sheet of stiff foam. The rest we’ll probably 3D print on the MakerBot. It will take a weekend, but this could be our first 100 percent digital craft project.

This is an example of what I talk about in Makers: manufacturing technologies are getting so easy and cheap (even free) that anyone can use them. Kids today can grow up as fluent in CAD as they are in everything else on computers.

Kids can learn this stuff, probably much easier than many of us would give them credit for. Many of them are already thinking spatially, playing computer games like Minecraft,¹ and intuitively understanding three-dimensional design.

Don’t hesitate to get them started with one of the programs listed in Chapter 6, “Digital Fabrication.” They’ll probably figure it out before you can.

Design Education

In a world in which kids’ educational and extracurricular activities are increasingly planned for them (and monitored with precision), proposing unstructured creative time doesn’t always go over well. Some school administrators seem hardwired to measure standardized test scores at the expense of long-term learning and inspired curiosity.

Proposing a maker-centric curriculum, even as part of the school day, can be administrative dynamite. That’s getting easier thanks to the growing influence of Maker Faires, but for Emily Pilloton, one of the pioneers of the new design-based curriculum, it was an uphill battle.

To her credit, Emily didn’t take on a small challenge. After finishing her education in architecture and product design, Emily and her partner, Matthew Miller, set out to reinvent vocational training. They created Project H Design and the Studio H curriculum, taking the standard shop class model and incorporating the entire preproduction phase: imagination, design, and planning. In her book Tell Them I Built This (TED Books, 2012), Emily explains why:

The addition of design gives students ownership and pride in what they will produce, and just as important, asks them to think about why their actions are important. Design makes production personal and meaningful, and develops creative problem-solving and exploratory skills that are applicable in any discipline.

It’s one thing to talk or write about reinventing vocational training, but quite another to actually do it. And to do it, Emily and Matt started in one of the most unlikely places: Bertie County, North Carolina. Originally invited by a visionary superintendent, Chip Zullinger, who had admired their Learning Landscape playgrounds, Emily and Matt traveled across the country full of excitement to put their ideas and experience into action. Just before they arrived, however, Zullinger was let go and the relationship with the school board became strained—Emily and Matt were caught in the political crossfire. Despite administrative headwinds, the pair stuck it out, largely because they believed in their model and the students they met in Bertie County.

They pushed forward with their design curriculum that would, in Emily’s words, “build public architecture projects for Bertie County—for, with, and by the hands of its students.”

They set out on an unknown course, without any set destination. Instead of telling the students what to create, they invited them to imagine. By flipping the mirror, they encouraged students to be vulnerable and uncomfortable. Emily wanted to show them that you can’t just show up with a bag of tools and start building—you need to plan. It introduces a certain rigor to the creative process, and exposes kids to “the non-linear chaos that comes with creativity.”

With the Bertie County students, the tangible goal was to create a farmers market for their town, which they did (and it is beautiful). The underlying goal of Studio H, though, is to create a sense of possibility within the students, a willingness to try and to be OK with failure. By teaching the design process in addition to the tools, they’ve given the students a real skill for the twenty-first century:

For our students, the table saw, X-Acto blade, and laser cutter are of equal importance and essentially serve the same function: to cut. We do not teach the tool; we teach the thinking. The tools are a way to achieve an ultimate goal. That goal, too, must always be rooted in citizenship. We must use our tools for the benefit of others. What is their value if not to construct the world we want to live in?

Maker Share

In June 2017, Maker Media announced the launch of a new online platform called Maker Share (makershare.com). Developed in collaboration with Intel, Maker Share is built to inspire creativity and collaboration. By curating their projects into portfolios, makers can share their creations and tell their stories, showcasing their skills to schools, employers, and collaborators and connecting with other makers. Through community missions, the platform also focuses the community’s talents on solving social and design problems. Maker Media founder and CEO Dale Dougherty explained: “Maker Share is a logical next step for us—an online version of Maker Faire, if you will. It is also an opportunity to connect makers around the world, some of whom exhibit at Maker Faires but also many who do not.” Maker Share will also host a collection of workshops and learning resources from master makers for all levels of experience.