Giving Compass' Take:

• Chris Berdik, writing for The Hechinger Report, discusses how new playful assessments could be helpful for gathering data on maker education and its efficacy. 

• What are the challenges of using evaluations to tell us about maker education? How can donors fund more research on makerspaces?

• Here are four ways to ignite your school's makerspace. 

Frame by frame, the simple round face sketched by seventh grader Annabelle Bechtel erupted into laughter in stop-motion animation, as she and her classmate Audrey Chung wove the face into a video they were making to explain satire. Other students were making their own videos, about foreshadowing, metaphor and other literary devices.

The kids worked at tables surrounded by craft supplies, 3-D printers and woodworking tools in the maker space of Corte Madera School, a public school for grades 4 to 8 nestled in the San Mateo County hills. Bechtel could readily recite the definition of satire. But what else was she learning in this maker space? With scarcely a month left in the school year, why was it worth spending time making videos rather than covering the next academic standard?

Backers of project-based learning, and its hands-on relative, maker education, would argue that activities like these not only deepen understanding of academic content but also bolster creativity, persistence, problem-solving and related skills that are critical for success in a rapidly changing world.

But assessing these skills has been a weak link in these efforts, according to the education researchers at the MIT Playful Journey Lab, which hopes to remedy that with “playful assessment” tools.

Maker-education advocates have a lot of student success stories to share but, so far, not a lot of data. Measurable results could help convince cautious administrators and skeptical parents that kids should spend more time on open-ended, creative pursuits rather than reading more books or memorizing the formulas and facts that burnish grade-point averages and standardized test scores.

Read the full article about maker education by Chris Berdik at The Hechinger Report.