SparkFun Stories of Success
Increasing Student Motivation Through Maker Education
Heather Politi, Nederland Middle/Senior High School Teacher
Boulder Valley School District, CO
Frustrated with the lack of persistence and problem-solving skills?
Nederland Middle/Senior High School teacher Heather Politi was looking for a way to encourage her students to take ownership of their learning. When she took SparkFun’s Microcontrollers for Educators course, she was inspired to incorporate maker education into her classroom.
Since making the switch, Politi has seen a dramatic change in her students. “It naturally creates an atmosphere of collaboration and curiosity in my classroom where students and teachers alike are asking, ‘What if we tried this?’ or ‘Is there a way to do that?’ Students come in at lunch and want to take home projects over the weekend. One student who was supposed to be in a study hall practically joined my class just to do projects for fun. My classroom becomes a wonderful semi-chaos of students building, asking questions, helping each other and shouting, ‘Politi! Politi! Come here! We gotta show you this!’ ”
One of the biggest benefits she has found is that “both persistence and creativity flourish” when students propose their own problems to be solved in connection with the projects they are creating.
“The three biggest benefits that I see of incorporating maker education are increased engagement, increased creative problem solving and more resilience and persistence in the learning process.”
Additionally, incorporating electronics and maker education into her classroom has allowed Politi to differentiate projects in order to meet students where they currently are. “I give a skeleton of requirements, and students take it from there. For example, my students have just started learning Processing and have created their first pixel art project. More advanced students made more complex designs and continued adding details, while students new to coding created more basic designs. All students were able to create images that reflected their own interests.”
Overall, Politi says that adding maker education to her classroom has solved the exact problem for which she set out to find a solution. “The three biggest benefits that I see of incorporating maker education are increased engagement, increased creative problem solving and more resilience and persistence in the learning process.”