Project Name
Multi-Gen STEM Makerspaces in Affordable Housing: Co-Designing a Model with the Community
The Multi-Gen Makers project is a collaboration with residents from Bayview Towers, a 200-unit affordable housing complex in Connecticut. Through a design-based research approach with iterative cycles of co-design, the project will develop and research a sustainable model for multigenerational making and learning that build the skills and dispositions that can support a STEM career trajectory.
Makerspaces are designed to facilitate problem-based and project-based learning that relies upon hands-on, collaborative learning experiences as a method for solving authentic problems. They empower young and adult learners as producers instead of consumers by providing them with access to materials and tools to make things of value to them.
The community’s range of interests, skills, and life experience will be key to informing decisions around activities and how the workshops take shape. The project will produce a web-based and downloadable Multi-Gen Maker Playbook comprising an educational guide for a series of workshops and a program model that guides similar communities on how to create and run sustainable and thriving programs of their own.
This project brings together CAST, the NHP Foundation/Operation Pathways, a national affordable housing provider with robust services for residents to support mobility from poverty, and the Boston University Social Learning Lab, which researches the social context for STEM learning.
The Multi-Gen Makers project will:
The Multigen Makers Playbook provides a guide for other affordable housing communities on how to co-create a makerspace program of their own. Playbook chapters include:
Visit the Multigen Makers Playbook and website
2020 – 2023
NSF Advancing Informal Science Learning (AISL), Innovations in Development
NHP Foundation/Operation Pathways
Boston University Social Learning Lab
Sam Johnston, CAST (PI)
Jess Gropen, CAST (Co-PI)
Kim Ducharme, CAST (Co-PI)
Kathleen Corriveau, Boston University (Co-PI)
Ken White, NHP Foundation/Operation Pathways (Co-PI)
For more information about this project, contact Kim Ducharme.