Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge discusses the proliferation of educational kits that seek to enhance "makerspacers," bringing out the inventor mindset in young learners. But are these tools all they're cracked up to be?

• There's an argument to be made on both sides: The kits could provide a foundation for teachers, but they may also limit the scope of what kids can do. Educators should proceed with caution and not depend on kits alone to create an open-ended classroom experience.

• Here's why makerspaces don't need expensive tech to be successful.

They go by names like littleBits, Makey Makey, Squishy Circuits and Makeblock, and their goal is to get kids thinking like inventors instead of passive learners. Aligned with the maker movement — which focuses on using hands-on activities like building, sewing, assembling and computer programming for learning — the kits provide a foundation that teachers can use for guided projects both in and out of the classroom.

But are pre-packaged kits really in the spirit of the maker movement, or are they just leading students down a narrow path without allowing them to be truly creative, inventive and genius?

Sylvia Martinez, co-author of “Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom,” says the answer to that question depends on the kit itself. “There’s kits and then there’s kits,” says Martinez. “I think there are definitely some that are more open-ended than others, and that offer a baseline for the teacher or parent who purchases the kit in order to help their child complete a [project].”

Having a set course down that path can be especially useful for the teacher who isn’t tech-savvy, or who needs a consolidated selection of parts to work with (versus having to pull together those parts individually). But moving to the next level on the makerspace ladder — often more open and exploratory — is also important. “A lot of teachers will then graduate after doing, say, 10 different kit-based projects,” says Martinez, “and realize that they probably don’t need hundreds of the same kits for the next school year.”

Read the full article about pre-packaged kits and makerspaces by Bridget McCrea at EdSurge.