This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 96 of a Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode, I'm going to be looking for the answer to this question.

What's the point of a makerspace?

For as long as I've been aware of makerspaces, I haven't quite understood them.

I've seen plenty of photos on social media with the towers made of marshmallows and toothpicks.

I've walked through exhibit halls at conferences where the coding and robotics displays

cause me to stop, stare, and try to look like I have some idea of what I'm looking at.

I even stumbled into a Twitter chat one night where a group of school librarians

was throwing around some pretty great ideas about building makerspaces in their libraries.

And yet, I still feel like I don't get it.

I have this picture in my mind of kids kind of messing around with Legos instead of,

I don't know, reading primary source materials that would shed light on some period in history,

or taping together some cardboard strips to make it into a car, or attaching some kind of wire

to a banana. And the more traditional stodgy control freak part of me says, it looks like a bunch of

hooi. But some of the smartest people I know are pretty into makerspaces. And the part of me that's

not a stodgy control freak, the part that knows there's a lot about tradition that we need to question,

that part of me wants to find out once and for all what's so great about makerspaces.

So I asked one of those smart people, my friend John Spencer, who was a classroom teacher for a

number of years and currently teaches at the university level. He's also the co-author with AJ

Giuliani of the books launch using design thinking to boost creativity and bring out the maker

in every student and empower what happens when students own their learning. He also teaches online

courses about project based learning, design thinking, and makerspaces. And I really trust his

...