Makerspaces and scientific creativity level of middle school students

Abstract

Being creative is something natural for children. However, as human beings advance in age, the ability to express creativity often decreases or even disappears. During adolescence is when people usually leave behind the creative freedom that was enjoyed in childhood. Makerspaces are spaces that offer tools and materials that encourage students to create. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of Makerspaces in scientific creativity level of eight grade students, using a quasi-experimental design pretest-posttest (Cook & Campbell, 1979). The participants of the research were 200 students who attend to a private school in Madrid during 2017-2018 academic years. The experimental groups selected covered the learning standards by doing a project in the makerspace, and the control groups covered the same standards by traditional learning in the classroom. To investigate scientific creativity of secondary school students, the Hu & Adey (2002) scale test was used. Our findings showed a significant difference in scientific creativity between the groups. The experimental group (maker-centered learning) had higher scientific creativity than control group (traditional learning). Authors such as Ramirez & Fuentes (2013) have shown that activities that help students to deal with real life situations, combined with methodologies of innovation that encourage creativity and promote the involvement and motivation of students, make them feel happier and help to develop students personally and professionally, as well as to improve their academic performance. We strongly recommend the use of makerspaces in schools as learning environments that will foster scientific creativity, influencing positively in the academic performance of students.

Keywords: Makerspaces; creativity; maker-centered learning; academic performance;