Innovative maker movement platform for K-12 education as a smart learning environment

Abstract

The growth of the maker movement has created a demand to include tools for digital fabrication in the school curriculum to foster STEAM education. Yet, the tools used by the maker movement remain sparse and do not exist integrated in the same environment for educational purposes. In this paper, we introduce a smart learning environment that collects the tools of design, 3D-printing, programming, sharing and data analytics into the single frame where K-12 level students and their educators can make maker movement artefacts while enhancing their STEAM skills. Our developed smart learning environment gathers data from the users’ digital trails and analyzes these data with several white-box data mining algorithms in order to support the educators’ interventions in the making activities carried out in the classroom.