Hackster Classroom for Teachers and Parents: Learning by Making

When consumer 3D printers and open source electronics came on the scene, there was a wave of excitement that these technologies would transform education. Private schools and public school districts alike rushed to create maker spaces. But now, a decade or so later, the results are decidedly mixed. What happened, and how can our community help make it more attractive for teachers to incorporate hands-on projects for their students? In this post, we will lay out what we think are some of the bigger problems. In future posts, we will suggest ideas for community project contributions and other challenges.

Too much information?

The two of us have been working with school maker spaces for over a decade and developing maker books and curriculum for a wide variety of audiences. Like many of the readers of this site, our background is technical, not education. Thus we come at teaching maker tech from the technical side, but with the goal of getting educators and students comfortable with incorporating more hands-on aspects into mainstream subjects. In 2015, we started off thinking that we would teach educators to use 3D printers and electronics, but we quickly found that just giving the “how” of these tools was not enough.

One thing we always wrestle with is how to give people just the right amount of information. There is a massive amount of open source information available for free. Some of it is great, some is misleading, and some is downright wrong or focused mostly on getting people to buy a particular set of stuff. Or, a project might be a tour de force, a totally amazing work that only an expert can do. Someone with no background might embark on it and get discouraged.

If a thoughtful teacher without much budget roamed around a little they would quickly drown in all the detail, and probably not see how this tied into the standards they need to use to guide their teaching. This makes it hard to get past the school stereotype of the maker space as “just a place to play around” and make key chains or other quick, one-and-done projects. This is unbalancing teaching about “how” and “what” at the expense of “why.”

Too little information?

At the same time, there has been a belief in the maker community that students can magically learn many academic subjects by discovery, if only they are given a lot of tools and time to mess around with them. This might be true if a kid happens to be the 9-year-old Marie Curie or Leonardo da Vinci, but by and large most of us benefit from a little guidance along the way.

Given that reality, a teacher using 3D printing or electronics in the classroom needs to think about both the point he or she is getting across, and also come up with appropriate projects. These projects also can’t be expensive or require long side excursions into teaching fabrication techniques (unless the fabrication technique can be part of the lesson, too). It takes precious preparation time and deep knowledge of both the subject matter and building, or in-depth collaboration among several busy colleagues, to make it happen.

Often, the answer is that projects stop short of using any tools or materials beyond traditional crafting. Many school maker spaces have the higher-end equipment managed by a staff person (sometimes an additional duty for a librarian). The maker space becomes someplace kids go for an hour for an occasional treat, rather than as an integrated part of the curriculum.

Market pull vs. technology push

If you are trying to sell a gadget, you need to point to a known problem that the gadget solves. This is sometimes called “market pull” — when customers want what you are selling and will seek it out. The opposite is sometimes called “a solution in search of a problem,” or “technology push.” This happens all the time, and sometimes a product is just so cool it succeeds anyway.

A problem with many maker tech products is that they are sold as cool in their own right (and are). However, it takes a bit of teacher imagination to create maker projects that are clearly meeting a market need. For example, the clipper ship shown in the photo that follows is a 3D-printed hull design with craft materials for sails. Kids can design it using the Tinkercad CAD program and some paper-and-skewer sail creation. However, it took a fair bit of planning and preparation to incorporate it into a lesson about the California Gold Rush. But the lesson was much richer than it would have been just reading about clippers, requiring an understanding of their design drivers and market niche.

Math education pain points

Current math education does not work well for many students. The book A Mathematician’s Lament by math teacher Paul Lockhart (published 2009 by Bellevue Literary Press) points out that if we taught art as a set of disconnected skills like we teach math, kids would complain about art being boring rather than begging to draw. Math-as-worksheets may train for tests, but will not build intuition for everyone. If students survive basic math, many of them wash out when they hit calculus, which is a gateway to many STEM careers. Even worse, we had an experience where an administrator said they loved what we were doing, but that parents would complain that the students were not learning math if they went home and said they had fun doing it!

One area that has been studied extensively is why some girls begin to under perform in, or move away from, STEM subjects. Recently, the prestigious science journal Nature published a study of over two million children in France that tried to tease out the beginning of this disparity. What they found, independent of the age of the students when they started school, was that the key factor in the start of the difference between math scores of girls and boys was starting to go to school. What is it about a school environment that starts to discourage girls, or disproportionately encourage boys? (The study itself is behind a paywall, but a Nature editorial from June 11, 2025 is not, and reviews it and related work.)

Mainstream math education is advertised to be a carefully scaffolded ladder of topics. In that view, if you fall off the ladder somewhere you may never get to the next rung. Professional engineers, mathematicians and others who use math every day to do real things see it more as a mesh, with many interconnected ways to get to a solution. Some people resort to algebra first to think about a problem, others to geometry. Almost every engineer we know will draw a picture first or build some wonky little visualization to help them think, and then do algebra later (or have a computer do it).

Making math (and more)

There is no quick solution to these issues, and there are many experiments out there. We have worked over ten years to find sweet spots in STEM education for maker tech. Because the issues in math are particularly acute, we have focused there, writing a series of project-based math books for Make: as well as lesson plans for teachers of blind students. In future columns, we will cover some of the approaches that have worked for us in depth, but let’s touch on a few key things we have learned.

Our guiding principle is the use of Universal Design. This is a philosophy that making something better for a group that is at some disadvantage often makes it better for many mainstream users, too. Some of our earliest support was from the blind and low-vision community, for which 3D-printed visualizations can be a true game changer. (We will talk about work to help blind users do their own tactile designs in a future column.)

Even with the noblest intentions, though, coming up with maker projects that fit in a more or less standard curriculum is hard. The two of us have benefited from a team approach: Rich learns geometrically and solves problems that way, often by playing around in a CAD program. Joan has a traditional engineering education and tends to wheel out a clanking pile of algebraic tools before she will believe anything that Rich has jumped to intuitively. Arguing about how to solve a problem between us often gives us ideas for crossover projects.

Learning earlier and later

A benefit or a problem, depending on your point of view, is that teaching math hands-on leads to teaching in a different order, since 3D concepts are often easier to visualize but harder to do algebra-first. Calculus, for example, was developed to describe physical systems. If you start with the physical systems and talk about calculus conceptually in context, you can give a very young kid the core concepts of calculus.

Calculus is where math starts to be fun, the equivalent of doing a full painting instead of learning to hold a brush. As such, it can be a framework and motivator for other pieces needed later for full-blown algebraic calculations. (Our Make: Calculus book teaches these concepts using LEGO bricks, as demonstrated in the photo that follows.) We have taught calculus with LEGO bricks to kids as young as nine years old in an after-school enrichment program for kids. Our goal is to make calculus concepts in third grade a standard!

Hands-on learning can be ideal for the other end of the educational spectrum. We have found many adult makers (a friend dubbed them “calculus regretters”) who failed calculus or who avoided it. They now find themselves not knowing the terminology or the notation and needing to read technical documents, and they don’t have the time to go back and laboriously re-learn all the background. Jumping in with physical analogs is a way to get up to speed faster for adult learners, particularly ones who like to build things. We think our approach works well for people who might be considered “under-prepared” for calculus, but who are working in jobs where at least some intuition could be valuable.

Challenges

The current educational system is very focused on assessment (testing and grading), getting to an answer, and “showing work”. We often get asked how you can grade a student who is learning by making something. Our answer is that you can still give them the same problems to solve on a test, although perhaps in a different order throughout the year. However, one might need to give latitude in the path a student takes to an answer. A side question is what part of the process is worth assessing, in a rapidly-changing environment where soon students may have an AI to do calculations in their pockets. They will still need to be able to validate that an answer from an AI is right, and so developing intuition is key.

There are issues when kids and educational infrastructure meet tech, too:

• Classroom-friendly software has to meet school privacy requirements. This is a complex, jurisdiction-dependent topic all on its own, and prevents kids under 13 (or 16, in some countries) from being able to access many web-based tools. On the other hand, downloadable software raises its own security issues, and may need to work well on older, outdated computers running Mac, Windows and Chrome OS.
• A lot of hobbyist (and therefore cheap) projects are not intended to be built, then taken apart and rebuilt by someone else. However, “make and take” projects can be beyond available budget at some schools.
• Letting kids use soldering irons and other tools is controversial in many schools, and so most electronics projects avoid soldering. This tends to drive the price of projects up, since partially-assembled or kid-specific tech is usually pricier than more DIY-type materials.
• Coding can be painful if kids have not learned to type. Block coding environments help with this, but not as much as one might think.
• Some schools have to fit all classes into 45-minute blocks, and it is hard to get a project started, make progress, and pack up and clean up in that time. Projects need to fall into natural 30-minute chunks to fit this environment. Storage for fragile work-in-progress projects for hundreds of kids is a challenge, too.

Beyond the technologies per se, time for technical and project management training for teachers and staff can be hard to come by. In something of a vicious cycle, teachers may need to make math training a priority, but, since they do not think about making as applying to math, maker-oriented training does not make the cut in tight budgetary times. Just knowing how to wire something up is not enough; subject-matter context, ideas, and project planning are needed too. We have seen a lot of emphasis on the abstraction of “Design Thinking,” but not enough on how to plan, manage and execute classroom projects under all of these constraints. To make it more annoying for a busy teacher, projects might use a lot of jargon and symbols that take time to look up.

In the classroom, kids will have widely different levels of experience with making things and some may finish fast, some may be perfectionists who restart over and over, and others will say, “I’m done,” when they are just bored or insecure. This means a teacher needs alternatives and extra projects to fill in spaces.

Finally, it is our sense that a lot of the energy that went into school maker spaces five years ago is swinging now to AI, virtual reality, and other intangible technologies. Although these have their place as well, we hope schools will not give up so easily on going beyond toilet paper tubes and hot glue in the physical world.

Starting a community

We hope that we can create a community here on Hacksterto help curate projects that are friendly for teachers and home school parents. Consider our list of challenges above as design requirements. What sorts of projects can you think of that might be a fun take on a topic you loved as a kid?

Talk to us on the Hackster Discord channel (use this invite if not in the group already) in the #-educator-parent topic to brainstorm. Or you can post a project in the Educator section on Hackster.io. Take it a step further and volunteer at a school to help teachers in person — they need all the help they can get!