Making Puppet Circuits

Abstract

The Prototyping Puppets project presents a craft-based prototyping project for STEM education of early middle school level students in informal learning. The project combines crafting and performing of hybrid puppets. It was pilot tested in two expert workshops (n = 6 and n = 10), which focused on crafting practices and materials and two student workshops (n = 8 and n = 9), which included performance elements. The resulting data back the main design concept to combine craft and performance in a STEM-focused maker project. They suggest particular focus on key elements of our educational scaffolding that focus on material performance in combination with crafting. We close with an outlook toward emerging changes as references for related work.