Maker Literacies For Middle School Math Education Students

EDML 4372 MAKER LITERACIES PILOT PROJECT

By Dr. Christopher Kribs

The assignment that I gave my students was to design and create via 3D printing a manipulative material that would facilitate some aspect of K-8 mathematics instruction and fill a gap in the commercially available materials.  We used TinkerCAD to design the materials and printed them in the UTA FabLab. I've provided photos of two students' finished materials below.

My own pedagogical purposes for the project were, first, to familiarize my students (all of them future middle school teachers) with 3D printing, enough that they might be comfortable using a 3D printer in schools where they teach in future (and teaching their own students how to use one); and, second, for students to analyze the properties, uses, and limitations of existing commercial materials, and to develop creative solutions to bridge gaps in those materials, based on their experiences in their field placements.

Students in this course teach in area middle school classrooms three days per week, and only come to campus twice per week, where they are in class for much of the day. They have very limited hours to spend in the FabLab. The unique access limitations for students in this class presented a welcome opportunity for the Maker Literacies team to investigate time-management competencies, identified as a maker-based competency. We designed a survey to gauge their time management habits at the beginning of the semester, and then again at the end of the semester for comparison. At the time of this report, the data has not been analyzed. We will provide more about that aspect in a future publication or report.

The primary obstacle in practice was that students' designs were often very ambitious compared to TinkerCAD's main strengths (and to the students' inexperience with 3D modeling), which was further complicated by FabLab staff sometimes recommending that students should be using other software in order to implement the more ambitious aspects of their designs. 

I plan to continue to use this project. The obstacles will be addressed in the future by (1) preparing a TinkerCAD tutorial which includes the most commonly needed skills for these projects, and (2) FabLab leadership debriefing FabLab staff at the beginning of the semester, to prevent staff giving confusing or contradictory recommendations to students.

Provided here are two examples of finished projects: