Toolkit

In the MakeApp Club project our two organisations teamed up to organise collaborative digital making activities for young people. Wavemaker, from Stoke-on-Trent, already had a digital makerspace at the time of launching their project whilst EST, from Wadowice, needed to set one up to provide a learning environment, where they could engage young people in digital creativity. From the very beginning, it was an exciting learning experience for us having been given the chance to share approaches, youth engagement strategies and technical expertise. After almost two years into the MakeApp project, we feel we are now at a point where we can share some of our journey and knowledge with other like-minded people. This is the purpose of the Digital Makerspace Toolkit published here.

This toolkit is designed to be the resource that we wished we’d had available to us when we were starting our makerspaces in Stoke and Wadowice. It covers some of the things that we learnt on the job: like what resources we needed, the most effective strategies for working with young people, and who you can contact to help you to get started.

The toolkit is aimed at helping enthusiasts, teachers, youth workers and volunteers to run small clubs, makerspaces and workshops. We want to enable the creation of a learning environment rich with possibilities, allowing anyone to expand their science, technology, engineering, arts, and maths (STEAM) skills through experimenting, tinkering and making. Small scale local makerspaces have a huge part to play in helping to develop the skills and aspirations of the digital makers of the future. See how we made our journeys towards these goals.

The Toolkit is available in two language versions, English and Polish.

We’ll be grateful for any feedback given through the very short survey available here.