Making as a Learning Process: Identifying and Supporting Family Learning in Informal Settings

There is a growing demand from educators and policymakers for definitions, measures, and guidelines of design that capture the qualities of making as a learning process. The articles that comprise this dissertation respond to this demand, mapping the practices and perspectives of the maker community to foundational theories of the learning sciences. Theoretically, the work is based in the communities of practice framework. In adopting this approach, I am able to distinguish what making is as a learning process, through the identification of the core learning practices of the making community, and to explore how such learning can be evidenced in the context of a designed informal learning environment.