Parents will tell you children have an amazing habit (that’s also slightly annoying if you are the one cleaning up after them): they will pick up discarded plastic bottles, toilet paper rolls, bottle caps, straws—and they will make new things out of them. They are not interested in what an object was built to do originally. They want to know what else it can be.
Laura Fleming, an educator and a champion of “maker spaces” who wrote two books about them, says that what drives a successful maker experience is precisely the desire to find out how things can transform. This natural impulse for exploration is what a maker space—an area in a school, community center, or museum where children learn by making things—attempts to cultivate and encourage. It provides the objects and tools and lets children unleash their creativity.
And children do—which prepares them to address more complex problems in adulthood. Solving a problem works the same way reinventing things does: you pick it apart and start building up a solution. Children know it; good engineers, designers, artists, and programmers know it too. We don’t know what the jobs of the future will be, but they will rely on individuals’ ability to reinvent things as well as themselves. The desire to find out what else something could be is what drives successful innovation, and global challenges require an explorer’s mindset.
This is the thinking behind the global maker space movement, which has been gathering momentum since the 1990s. The first maker spaces were the work of forward-looking teachers and principals in a handful of schools in the United States and Europe. Today, there are thousands of maker spaces on both continents.
Children in Bulgaria can now give “making” a try at Muzeiko’s new maker space, which opened its doors on February 27. Among the first grown-up makers at Maker Space were US Ambassador to Bulgaria Eric Rubin and Bulgarian Minister of Education Krasimir Valchev.
For the next three months, young makers will be able to build their own flying machines, experiment with different materials and dimensions, and find out why some aircraft models fly better than others. Another activity will invite children to test how different materials and shapes fly in a wind tube. Muzeiko visitors will also be able to assemble drones and learn more about the impossible missions drones undertake to help people affected by natural disasters.
So, parents, your days cleaning after household experiments are over! Just take your kids to Muzeiko’s Maker Space, and let their imaginations run wild. Who knows, maybe your child is the next Wilbur or Orville Wright—who proved to everyone manned flight is possible.
Next up in Maker Space in 2019? Animation, Superheroes, and Construct Your Future. Don’t miss out!
