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Becoming Makers: Examining "Making" Literacy in the Elementary School Science Classroom

Published:27 June 2017Publication History

ABSTRACT

This paper extends the concept of digital literacy and applies it to Making. Through case descriptions, we contribute an understanding of how children can become or fail to become individuals literate in Making within a formal learning context. Our analysis draws from video recordings and other data sources of two 4th grade classrooms in which the students, who had already participated in 1.5 years of more structured 'makified activities', engaged in an open-ended, exploration-based, and playful task that was more in line with the spirit of Making. Student teams were classified as 'high in Making literacy' and 'low in Making literacy', revealing how Making literacy was expressed at the level of skills, mental models, and practices in various ways for different students. Our qualitative analysis demonstrates what burgeoning Making literacy may mean in a public elementary school classroom, paving the way for a vision of a time when Making becomes generalized practice.

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  1. Becoming Makers: Examining "Making" Literacy in the Elementary School Science Classroom

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      IDC '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children
      June 2017
      808 pages
      ISBN:9781450349215
      DOI:10.1145/3078072

      Copyright © 2017 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 27 June 2017

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      IDC '17 Paper Acceptance Rate25of118submissions,21%Overall Acceptance Rate172of578submissions,30%

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