Review / Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom

While visiting a branch of our city's library system we don't often find ourselves at, I browsed the tiny section on education. I found Invent to Learn by chance, and though the title's font left me a bit skeptical, I decided to give it a try. I'm glad I did.

The premise of the book is that adopting principles of making into formal and informal education is both feasible and worthwhile. The focus is on maker projects oriented around fabrication, physical computing, and computer programming. The book starts with solid learning theory and goes all the way to how to actually teach with open-ended maker projects.

I'm admittedly an education nerd, so I was delighted to see the book start with some relevant education history, learning theory, and discussion on "thinking about thinking." Seymour Papert, creator of Logo among many other things, is a central figure threaded throughout.

Papert coined the term constructionism, which builds on a previously established theory of learning, constructivism. As defined in the book, constructivism is:

...a well-established theory of learning indicating that people actively construct new knowledge by combining their experiences with what they already know. Constructivism suggests that knowledge is not delivered to the learner, but constructed inside the learner's head.

On constructionism:

Papert's constructionism takes constructivist theory a step further towards action. Although the learning happens inside the learner's head, this happens most reliably when the learner is engaged in a personally meaningful activity outside of their head that makes the learning real and shareable. This shareable construction may take the form of a robot, musical composition, paper mâché volcano, poem, conversation, or new hypothesis.

The authors claim that constructionism is the learning theory that resonates most with the maker movement, and build the rest of the book on this idea.

The rest of the text covers what makes a good project, what 'making' means today, the three game-changers in making (the aforementioned fabrication, physical computing, and programming), the practical stuff of actually teaching through maker projects, and how to convince others that the maker approach is a good idea.

Many concrete resources and materials are described throughout the book. It was published in 2013, though, so a lot of the specifics are likely to be out of date. Nonetheless, the suggestions should serve as a good starting point. (As a side note, the book's website, inventtolearn.com, appears to have been hacked, so best not to visit it at the moment.)

Overall, if you are curious about having your students learn by making things (real or virtual), and want to get a taste of the theory behind why it might work as well as the practical suggestions on how to do it, it's worth checking this book out.