Promoting Students’ Interest in Learning Through Play in a Makerspace

Abstract

Makerspaces have been increasingly popular in education to achieve interest-driven creation and learning. In this paper, we describe background of makerspace, uncover its advantages in stimulating intrinsic motivations and natural curiosity of learners, and propose a framework to operationalize makerspace. We target to investigate learning affordances, contextual conditions (e.g., community-building mechanisms, infrastructural settings), dos and don’ts around the development of such ground-up initiative in Singapore. Our assumption is that such design of learning environments and/or pedagogies could be avenue to promote and optimise “interest”, “creation” and/or “habit” in learning