Maker Education

Maker Education

"Learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge”

In Maker Education, students participate in self-directed, hands-on learning experiences utilising a range of tools and materials to create personally meaningful objects. They learn to use prototyping techniques and new technology including 3D-printing, micro-controllers and basic programming to realise their ideas. As they tinker, they learn valuable skills and mindsets including resourcefulness, resilience, collaboration and communication.

Why Maker Education

Learning occurs when a new experience makes connections to existing knowledge.

  • Learning cannot be delivered to the learner.

  • The best way to ensure understanding inside your head is through active construction of shareable things outside your head.

  • Enhance learning experience and promote self-directed learning 

  • Sense of success & Joy of learning

  • Sense of autonomy and agency for students

In 2014, Commonwealth Secondary decided to adopt and adapt maker education as a means to enhance the educational experience of our students, to achieve greater experiential learning as detailed in the Total Curriculum Framework, and to support existing programmes such as Design Thinking (through the provision of rapid prototyping facilities). At the same time, the changing educational landscape has precipitated a call to make education more relevant, student-centred, concrete, authentic and exciting for today’s digitally-raised children. Maker education, as a pedagogical strategy leveraging the affordances of the maker movement and adopting a constructionist approach (Papert and Harel, 1991), is well placed to meet this challenge of re-invigorating our educational programmes.

To support Maker Education activities, the school has developed a custom-built Maker Space (d.space) which provides the environment, equipment and materials for students to develop their skills and mindsets as young Makers. Our d.space (Maker Space) for students to drop in for workshops and to tinker around.

Since 2019, Maker Education in Commonwealth Secondary School has expanded into the TrailBlazer Programme where students have the freedom to choose any types of purposeful making and creation. Click the link to find out more about the TrailBlazer Programme.