About the project
Making Spaces was a research project based at UCL. Working with makerspaces in eight countries, the project identified and shared equitable practice to support diverse young people’s engagement with STEM.
Makerspaces are informal sites for collaborative hands-on learning and creative production, with or without tools. These innovative learning spaces offer the opportunity to share materials, skills and ideas to address technological, personal, and societal goals.
These spaces have the potential to offer valuable opportunities to underserved and underrepresented young people who are typically marginalised from mainstream engineering, science and technology. The Making Spaces Project, led by Professor Louise Archer (UCL Institute of education), and funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation, sought to support equitable youth practice within the sector to enable more makerspaces to fulfil these aims.
Makerspaces need accessible new understanding and resources to support inclusive STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) participation that in turn can address societal challenges, empower learners and communities. This project identified effective, inclusive practices for supporting makerspaces to engage with young people in making for social change.
The project partnered with ten international makerspaces in the UK, USA, Nepal, Slovenia, Palestine, Ghana, Switzerland and Pakistan to extend understanding of what socially-just makerspace youth practice entails and translate this into practical resources for implementation.
Working collaboratively, researchers, practitioners and youth from under-represented communities worked to:
- Test out and extend existing equitable practices within makerspaces.
- Translate insights into co-produced, practical, and accessible resources that can be used across global makerspace contexts.
- Create a cohort of trained professionals who can deliver training globally on resources from the project.
We hope the resulting outputs and resources can be used to inform and improve international STEM education policy and practice in and beyond makerspaces.
Resource Launch 2024
On June 18th 2024, the Making Spaces team launched new resources for the makerspace and informal STEM education sectors.
Find out more by watching our event video reading this article by UCL.
At the launch we also announced the Making Good Prize awards and displayed our installation – ‘The Spark Tent’.
