Making: More State Fair, Less Science Fair

Graphic that reads, "Making: More State  F air, Less Science Fair"

I’ve been spending much of the extended weekend in DIY land. The pleasure of DIY home improvement is that your hands are busy, which gives your mind time to think. And boy, I’ve been thinking.

One thing I’ve been marinating on, especially after the IMLS Focus meeting, is whether or not my vision for makerspaces is bounded by coding or STEM. Like many other people, my initial thinking fell along those kinds of lines. This year, we explicitly articulated STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) as a goal, and that was a move in the right direction. I started saying that I wanted our maker culture to be the kind of experience that everyone in a family could come to and feel welcome.
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Today, as I was puttering about, it hit me: I want making to be more like a state fair (a place where creation of all kinds is welcomed) than a science fair (STEM-only). At a state fair, multiple kinds of productivity are on display. Whether you raise vegetables or sheep, can vegetables or make jam, draw pictures or make quilts, run competitively or show your horse, entertain or be entertained, display your stamp collection or your needlepoint, there are lots of entry points for folks at a state fair (including science!). The Minnesota State Fair is a great example of this wide breadth of activities, if you’d like to see more.

What do you think?

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