We’re making a makerspace of makers in separate Zoomspaces, teaching tricks of the trade through tiny lenses—we can only show so much, see so much—we’re building fan-powered vehicles, each student given a motor with two wires attached: one red, one black, to connect with a battery, to complete a circuit where the motor will run and the fan will spin and the vehicle will be built up around that internal structure like a thick exoskeleton protecting delicate organs; and my oh my are these innards delicate — ever so finicky — one misstep, and the wire parts ways with the motor, leaving only a tiny nodule of metal exposed; the student’s whole world shudders to a halt—“it’s broken!! I’ve broken it!! Now what will I do??”—the mentor’s heavy sigh is audible even through this virtual interface that was specifically built to block out menial audio such as sounds of processes that keep us all alive—“ok, so here’s what we’ll do”, the mentor is mediating her reaction impressively, effervescing disciplined calm—in-person it would take little effort to remedy this common obstacle, but from behind the screen, the mentor can’t simply guide the fumbling fingers of a fourth-grader, who’s never played with wires, or motors, or the combination, before—“ok, can you hold up your motor so I can see it?”—up until this point the little one had her camera on, but tipped back so the only visible part was the crest of her head with her neat middle part slicked in two space-buns spiraling up and secured with cerulean bobbles—“ya” she says—space-buns tipping downward and sliding out of view—“here ya go”—space-buns back in the picture, but still that’s all we see—“ok, can you tip down your camera, please, so we can see?” the mentor is admirably patient—“oh ok, ya” — a small umber hand with sparkly teal painted fingernails reaches up, angling the camera to the grey carpeted floor upon which she is working—the wire is disembodied from the motor and now the mentor must verbalise the surgical procedure to suture the set together again, and it’s no small feat: first, you have to strip the wire, but unlike in-person, you don’t have the proper tools, so you’ve gotta take your kiddy scissors and slice super carefully—press hard enough so that the protectively blunt blade can cut through the tubing, but delicately as to avoid chopping right through the copper (this is essentially impossible, even for grown-ups who have played with wires, and motors, and the combination, before) she tries, and CHOP, “what do I do now?? “ok, try again, but gently”, she tries, and CHOP, “I can’t do it”, “you can!” she tries, and CHOP, eyes watering, space-buns drooping, sparkles dimming… “I believe in you!” “try holding the scissors very lightly and rotate the blades around the wire, ever so slightly, sawing in circles, until the plastic wears down, and the copper is exposed and, you can peel away the plastic and then you’ll have stripped the wire, and then we can move on to the next step!”

– A spoken-word piece written by J.C. Leapman in reflection on an online making and tinkering session.

Introduction

The spoken-word poem that serves as our opening vignette captures the reflections of a graduate student and mentor (and co-author of this chapter), writing shortly after navigating this challenging moment as they facilitated an electronics activity with a small cohort of fourth-graders, all at a distance, via Zoom video-conferencing software. Such moments—a wire pulls loose and must be reconnected—are mundane and recurrent in hands-on electronics work, but the pedestrian nature of the moment did nothing to mute the big feelings that emerged. The poem notes, repeatedly, how very limited the tools were in this moment, with the typical suite of in-person moves cut down to just words and gestures through a small rectangle of video and an audio stream. The piece evokes the profound longing of this micro-era of mentoring and tinkering at a distance—longing for a better view, for better tools (wire strippers!), for more reliable parts and, most of all, for hands that could reach safely across the social-distance to guide and reconnect those recalcitrant wires. Yet too, the poem evokes hope and joy and humor in connection, in re-connecting not only loose wires but people, despite distance and grainy video and unintentionally being on mute—“I believe in you!”

Breakdowns are frustrating and, at times, demoralizing. Traditional models of schooling work to divide the learning of complex concepts and skills into a sequence of achievable steps, each within manageable reach of the last, so that one can make steady progress up a ladder of learning with no setbacks or failures (Tyler, 2013). Such is not the case for authentic real-world problems, which often thrust us into complexities we are not fully ready for, with consequent setbacks, moments of impasse, or outright failure. So too for projects and problem-based approaches to education, which favor holistic engagement within activities over carefully sequenced curricula. In these environments, authenticity is a central value, as is learning to navigate through inevitable challenges, pitfalls, and stopping points.

Moments of breakdown, unpleasant as they may be, offer profound opportunities for reflection, growth, and learning. The connection between breakdowns and learning is well established in philosophical treatments of learning, including the work of Heidegger, Leont’ev, and Dewey (Koschmann et al., 1998). Breakdowns disrupt the status quo of our thinking; throw us into disequilibrium with our environment; and demand shifts in knowledge, skill, or context. One of the core theoretical and pedagogical commitments in our work in Beta Lab Links is a focus on how young people come to be more flexible, adaptive, and facile in dealing with the inevitable breakdowns that occur when pursuing project work (Martin & Dixon, 2016). It is perhaps appropriate, then, that this chapter focuses on insights gained as we coped with and navigated through disruptions to our programming caused by COVID-19 related school and after-school program site closures.

By reflecting on what was important at our sites before COVID-19 closures, and what emerged as important principles as we moved online, we have seen a set of parallel ideas come into relief that highlight a reciprocal dynamic between the hands-on project work (building things) and the social processes of trust and rapport (building relationships).

We will begin by sharing our core pedagogical commitments and how they were manifest in our work with youth in the “before times” prior to COVID-19 closures. We then discuss our efforts to move our work with youth online, and how this major breakdown in our educational routines acted as a catalyst for reflection.

Program Context: Across Transitions

Beta Lab Links creates opportunities for young people to engage in imagining, designing, and building “maker” projects of their own choosing. The idea of “making” is broad and has a long history, but the term has more recently become associated with playful tinkering and design work that combines low-tech craft technologies, such as sewing, woodworking, or papercraft, with high-tech tools, such as microcontrollers or 3-D printers (Martin, 2015). Making and tinkering hold promise to connect youth to fun, hands-on experiences with design, engineering, and STEM ideas and competencies. Unfortunately, the ideas of a “maker movement” is often associated with White, affluent, and male pursuits, but many scholars have countered this narrative by embracing an asset-based lens on making and connecting the core tenets and practices of making and tinkering with diverse experiences and epistemologies (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2018; Vossoughi et al., 2016).

In this vein, Beta Lab’s pedagogy has long emphasized a broad notion of “meeting youth where they are.” We employ this idea in several senses. First, we mean it physically, with a mobile maker van or virtual spaces that can travel to or connect to the spaces youth already inhabit. Second, we mean it cognitively, in beginning with the cognitive assets youth bring into interaction, including their knowledge, skill, and interests. Third, we mean it affectively, in attending to youth identities and sense of what is good and important as well as troubling or undesirable in their lives (Martin & Dixon, 2019). Navigating the disruptions of the pandemic helped us to see these multiple senses in a new light.

Like many other University-Community Links (UC Links) sites (https://uclinks.berkeley.edu/programs), Beta Lab includes undergraduates as mentors. The leading goal in working with undergraduate mentors is to help them see youth through an asset-based lens (Martin & Wendell, 2021), attending to and fostering the unique skills, knowledge, interests, and practices youth bring into a space. Mentors also bring their own assets, of course, including their own interests, cultural repertoires of practice (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003), and disciplinary ideas and tools such as representational systems (like written mathematics) and processes (like the engineering design process). Beta Lab’s broad educational goal is to foster the development of adaptive expertise in designing and making, so that youth have the cognitive and non-cognitive tools and literacies needed to adapt to challenges, learn new things, and solve novel problems.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Beta Lab had two active sites in the Davis/Sacramento California area. At our high-school based site, we visited the school once per week, taking over the science laboratory and creating a “pop-up” maker space for students enrolled in a maker elective (in lieu of an off-site internship day). The maker van (Figs. 9.1 and 9.2) would arrive on site in the morning and the high-school students, UC Davis undergraduate mentors, graduate students, and faculty would all pitch in to unload and transport the materials and machines to the classroom. After the tools and materials were moved into place, we would gather in a circle to start our day with an ice-breaker question (a student favorite, “Describe your mood today as a type of breakfast food”) to foster a sense of playful rapport. If it was early in the school year, we would move into small-group skill-building workshops (e.g., learn to sew, or learn to use the laser cutter), but later in the year students would break out into small groups to work on projects of their own choosing and design. Past projects included a go-cart, a light-up headboard, cosplay gear, and an embroidered patch to commemorate Mexico’s participation in World War II.

Fig. 9.1
A photograph of a van with a logo on the side that reads Beta Lab, build, engineer, tinker, adapt.

Beta Lab maker van

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Fig. 9.2
A photograph of the view of the inside of the Beta Lab maker van. It has shelfed tools and materials.

Inside of the Beta Lab maker van

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Students worked in groups to think critically, plan, and execute their maker projects. No one in the space was an expert on every tool, but as time passed, students grew savvy on who knew what and where to look for information. They also learned that, in this space, asking for help was the norm, not a sign of weakness. Undergraduate students would circulate from table to table to check in or lend a hand. They were encouraged to work on their own maker projects as well, sometimes asking the high-school students for design or technical advice.

At the elementary school site, we worked with an after-school program for Latinx youth in fourth-grade. Each year, we chose a signature project for all students to pursue. Projects were selected to hit the sweet spot between being open to individual creative expression while being constrained enough to allow for progress in hour-long sessions. Past project themes always involved electronics and included creating highly decorated motorized vehicles, and, in the lead-up to Spring 2020, creating robotic “pets” out of cardboard, decorative craft supplies, and motors, lights, and sensors, all connected to a microcontroller that students could program to act the way they wanted.

When the COVID-19 pandemic closed both sites, we worked to transition to online education. Beta Lab’s emphasis on in-person and hands-on making made this transition challenging. While we were quickly able to distribute maker kits and activities to youth, a variety of logistical and bureaucratic difficulties made it slow to reconnect our undergraduate mentors with youth in synchronous sessions. By late Fall 2020, and through the end of the 2021 academic year, we were able to partner with the Boys & Girls Club of Sacramento to host weekly online sessions with upper elementary school-aged youth to facilitate maker activities with them. These activities focused primarily on papercraft and electronics, as these are low cost and do not require additional tools. Each week, the mentors led online Zoom sessions creating and sharing simple craft and electronics creations, from catapult-like launchers to light-up jewelry to fan-powered electric cars.

As our opening vignette highlights, these sessions were a stew of frustration and joy. Children and mentors alike were happy to connect with one another, but were also exhausted from months of video-conference-based schooling. They were eager to create together, but also frustrated by misbehaving wires and batteries and spools of tape. This period of time ended with a paradoxical sense that what we had collectively created in these months together on video was beautiful and important, and that none of us wanted to do it ever again. What lessons, then, can we glean from this profound moment of disruption?

Key Ideas

When we envision a Beta Lab Links site working at its best, we see a dynamic environment with all participants (youth, undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty alike) engaged in a community of making and tinkering. Everyone feels a sense of belonging, purpose, and comfort in knowing that their particular assets are valued within the space. Everyone engages in making things, whether silly or serious, trying new things out, taking intellectual risks, sharing with others, and getting new ideas, feedback, and inspiration from the group. In such a space, we can see that both the making of things and a robust sense of community are critical components. While we have long noted the importance of making and community, moving online helped us to see how each provides a pathway to the other. This realization came not as a lightning bolt of unexpected insight but as a slow realization of an idea long carried but previously unnamed.

To begin with, we can consider the ways in which a sense of community and belonging can create opportunities for rich engagement with making and tinkering. The importance of community, rapport, and belonging have long been acknowledged in our spaces. We can see this in undergraduate mentors’ reflections from before the pandemic. As one undergraduate mentor wrote in a reflection in pre-pandemic 2020, “Even though the Maker Movement is focusing on learning and growing students’ skills, I think that a major part of it is also the community-building aspect. Community building involves creating a sense of belonging by building relationships with the students and other mentors.” She added, “The first tip I would give future mentors is to create relationships with various students. Ask them how they are and tell them little things about you to spark some kind of conversation. It makes it easier for students to ask for help from people they feel like they know.”

Although established in the past, the need for connection and relationships became much more salient with the school closures, social distancing, and lockdowns of the pandemic. Ideas for warm-up activities, or icebreakers, were a favorite topic among undergraduate mentors, as they were eager to share ideas and compare notes on how to quickly and effectively open up a social space during a session, despite widespread “Zoom fatigue.” These warm-ups were not just about breaking the silence. They were really about building connections across people. As one undergraduate mentor reflected:

During the mentoring sessions, my peers used the warm-up question as a way to strike up further discussion during the work period. By learning more about the students’ personal lives, I learned from my peers about the importance and impact of connectedness. I think the pandemic felt isolating for many, including some of our students who enjoy interacting with others. By providing students the opportunity to talk freely, be heard, and discuss their interests, we started to create a sense of belonging for our students in our virtual classroom. Belongingness opens the door to feeling safe in a classroom and eventually leads to a willingness to vulnerability. A student’s vulnerability is demonstrated when they share ideas and test out their projects, despite any fears, such as failure.

Here, this mentor notes not only the importance of connection as a basic human need, but also the ways in which being and feeling connected to others was essential for deeply and authentically engaging in the work of making and tinkering, including sharing ideas, testing out projects in front of others, and being vulnerable.

Another mentor reflected on the importance of belonging for doing one’s best work:

I did not expect to be moved by the Beta Labs sessions in the way I was, but I was simply in awe of how children are able to connect so easily with other humans. Even after such a difficult year living through a pandemic, they did not seem to care that we were interacting through a computer screen. Children share their thoughts openly and want to converse. At one point, a student even asked if everyone could just stay on the call to talk to one another – a clear sign that they crave human interaction and connectedness. Everyone wants to feel like they have a safe space that they belong to, and I think K-12 schooling should try to create this space in every classroom. Working with Beta Lab reminded me of the importance of belonging, for all people, not just younger students. For example, I felt a sense of belonging, as I felt motivated by the entire team to show up to meetings and contribute what I could. The power of belonging and connectedness can motivate people to do their best work and show up authentically, which I was able to witness throughout this experience.

In this view, belonging allows people to “show up authentically” and make contributions. Feeling safe allows people to share their work, try things, make mistakes, and then keep going, all of which are essential to engaging in making and tinkering. Here we see that efforts to build relationships can help youth to engage in “building things” in the maker learning environment (Fig. 9.3).

Fig. 9.3
A flow diagram. Connection and belonging leads to making and tinkering.

A sense of community and belonging can create opportunities for rich engagement with making and tinkering

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At the same time, we saw that engagement with hands-on making and tinkering created opportunities for social engagement and connection with others. Not all youth find warm-up activities, which are often highly verbal and often ask them to share information about their personal lives, interests, and so forth, to be engaging. Some stay quiet or engage as minimally as they feel that they can get away with. For some of these youth, engaging with materials is a much more comfortable entry point into collective activity. For example, one mentor wrote about their experience with a student who did not want to share during the warm up about favorite foods, but whose excitement about their project got them engaged and sharing later in the session:

However, once the student was allowed to begin the project, their curiosity sparked, which shifted their focus. By being able to work with their hands and test out their ideas, the student was able to invest their interest in the project in front of them, rather than their feelings of reservations. By the end of the session, the student was open to sharing their project and curious about next week’s project.

In this example, showing (and talking about) their project was easier than talking about their own self in a warm-up activity. The hands-on activity provided an entry point to the social space. Within a reflection assignment, a different undergraduate mentor shared a similar story of movement from being reluctant to speak to being more fully engaged in the social space of the session, emerged:

Although this student can be quite shy, she is definitely blooming every session so far. I was really excited to see her ask most of the questions this session regarding how to keep the wires on the motor, how to strip the wires, how to test the direction of her motor, and how to attach wires properly on the switch. … Towards the end of the session, she had shared a colorful fan she had created and was excited to see it work and move efficiently.

Here too, engagement in the session flowed out of excitement for project work and all of the components and how they might fit together.

Across these examples we can see that, for a subset of students, making and tinkering came first, and a sense of connection to the group came second (Fig. 9.4).

Fig. 9.4
A flow diagram. Making and tinkering leads to connection and belonging.

Engagement with hands-on making and tinkering can create opportunities for social engagement and connection with others

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Discussion

As we noted in our introduction, traditional models of schooling often present learning as sequential steps, each step within manageable reach of the last. If you follow the path, the logic goes, learning is supposed to come along. Yet all of us who have walked more than a few steps in the world know that life is full of disappointments and breakdowns, from those as small as a loose wire to those as large as a global pandemic that completely reshapes day-to-day life. Learning to live more fully in the world means learning to grow and adapt with these inevitable challenges, and we believe we do a disservice to youth when we shelter them too much from setbacks and bumps in learning. A primary attraction of making and tinkering activities has always been that they are fertile soil for (usually) manageable breakdowns. In navigating the Beta Lab program through the pandemic, we too had to learn and adapt from breakdowns, big and small.

In this chapter, we examined the reciprocal processes between belonging and making. When we reflected back upon our efforts before the pandemic, we can see that this reciprocity was in play all along, but the move to an online space, which disrupted both our ability to make connections and our typical processes of hands-on tinkering, made salient the ways in which each of these essential components of our pedagogy are facilitative of the other. For some students, beginning with hands-on materials and playful engagement was a means to connect others. We have always encouraged Beta Lab mentors to play with materials and work on projects within sight of youth, to create a sense that we are all makers and tinkerers. This can be a great way to build relationships, as it gives people something to talk about that is present, that can be gestured at, and that can feel less personal than revealing things about oneself. For other students, hands-on materials, especially unfamiliar ones like motors and microcontrollers, can be intimidating. It can be embarrassing to share that you do not know or understand, or to ask for help. In these cases, it is beneficial to build trusting relationships first, whether through shared interests, favorite foods, or shared cultural connection such as speaking the same language. When a sense of trust and safety is established, it becomes easier to be vulnerable, to ask for help, to try new things, and to learn.

Beta Lab’s focus on belonging and connection across people aligns well with a broad theme in this volume: we see how Y-PLAN emphasizes connections across youth and adults and the concerns of the community; how Nuestra Ciencia examines the power of language practice for connecting people to each other and their heritage; how B-Club, Math CEO, Corre la Voz, Community Based Literacies, and others take belonging as a central construct on their work. We take connection literally and metaphorically—connecting people while also connecting components and circuits as young people build, together. We hope for assemblages, both material and social, where wholes are greater than the sums of their parts, and where people feel invited not in pieces, but are welcomed wholly.

Connection and belonging, as lovely and important as they are in their own right, are not only about good feelings. They are essential to creating opportunities for the deep and transformative intellectual work we hope to see all participants—youth, undergraduate mentors, graduate students, and faculty—take up. Making and tinkering activities are not always profound—many maker activities hew to the familiar formula of a step-by-step guide, or provide only marginal opportunities for personalization of an otherwise turnkey project. While there can be value in such activities, they are limited. We are most interested in versions of making and tinkering that invite participants into a much more expansive proposition, one that suggests that all people ought to have the chance to see their worlds as designed and to envision themselves as designers, capable of bringing their ideas to fruition.

Such a vision requires a focus on a sense of belonging, for we do not meaningfully engage people as designers until we honor and engage their rich and varied assets—their strengths, ideas, hopes, cultures, and knowledges—and these assets can and will only enter collective spaces when community, connection, and belonging create opportunities for them to do so. Learning environments focused on making and tinkering must therefore be as much about building relationships as about building things, both in reciprocal relation with one another, making connections across whatever divides we face.