From Digital Fabrication to Meaningful Creations: Pedagogical Perspectives

Digital fabrication consists of a range of techniques used to create products from digital designs. For the development of the digital citizen, digital literacy is a fundamental skill that digital fabrication could assist in developing. However, the main question is how to support education systems in order to promote fundamental skills, since the history of educational technology shows that changing technology requires changes in teacher's skills, curricular foundations and technical infrastructures in general. In this paper, we look at pedagogical approaches that facilitate the intake of technologies to be used in educational contexts through digital fabrication. First, we present our design thinking based approach encompassing five stages: ideation, planning, creation, programming and sharing, to imbue digital fabrication with meaningful creations in education. The paper continues to present students' work and provides a summary feedback from teachers. We conclude by arguing that teaching approaches and learning stages are good to structure learning through digital fabrication ex-ante, and that there is a need to also support the experiential dimension on the teachers' side by acquiring a 'coach's mindset', following students' ideas.