During a recent Cricut-sponsored webinar on technology and learning, Vincent Young, VP of Marketing, explained how the maker movement has evolved over the years and where it’s headed in the future.
Watch the full webinar on demand here.
How the Maker movement is evolving
For a school, a makerspace can instill a sense of pride in both students and teachers with custom-made items. While creating custom items began as a home-based hobby for some (with others using professional services to create custom items), Cricut has brought custom designs into the classroom for educational purposes.
“Right now, about a quarter of U.S. elementary and secondary schools report that they have a Cricut somewhere on their campus,” Young says. “Roughly the same number, about a quarter of all U.S. elementary and secondary teachers say they actually have a Cricut at home. So it’s a very popular product not only within the school community, but also within the educator community.”
Cricut seeks to help foster the maker movement by encouraging creativity among students, teachers, administrators, parents, and anyone involved in the educational field. The main goal of the maker movement is to encourage and enhance design skills and design thinking, traits that would be highly valued in the professional world.
Over the past ten years, the movement has incorporated various technologies that meet creative needs. Many of these forms of technology have been introduced into the educational field over time, from simple forms of technology to advanced 3D printers.
Cost and relevance
The maker movement from the primary to secondary level helps create school spaces dedicated to fostering creative thinking, hands-on learning, and vocational skills development. Two of the factors that have influenced the movement for many schools revolve around cost and relevance.
“Despite the popularity of many of these technologies, cost remains a barrier,” Young says. “The second has to do with relevance. When we think about the range of things that can be made, it’s not relevant to a full range of educators and students from kindergarten through 12th grade. It’s also not relevant to a full range of school subjects. So a lot of the technology in the K-12 maker movement has been relegated to high schools in the engineering or maker curriculum.”
What does the future of the K-12 Maker movement look like?
Young points out how the future of the K-12 maker movement involves more creativity on the part of the user while also building on what was already established in maker spaces.
“It’s about bringing humanity into the next iteration of technology,” he said. “When we think about the next generation of the maker movement from preschool through high school, it’s about leveraging the things that were cool in the last ten years. It was centered around the object, the making of a thing. It’s about leveraging that, but making it a little bit more human.”
Cricut's goal is to offer more interaction with users in the product creation movement from preschool through high school, giving them more freedom and helping them feel more connected to the things they create. In the past, few people knew how to use the technology used to create certain items. Cricut wants to expand the number of people who have access to these devices and know how to use them to express their creativity.
