Making as a Pathway to Foster Joyful Engagement and Creativity in Learning

The Workshop of Making as a Pathway to Foster Joyful Engagement and Creativity in Learning (Make2Learn) aims to discuss the introduction of creative and joyful production of artifacts in the learning processes. A variety of environments have been developed by researchers to introduce making principles to children. Making principles enable them foster co-creativity and joy in learning processes and construct knowledge. By involving children in the design decisions they begin to develop technological fluency and the needed competences, in a joyful way. Make2Learn aims to bring together international researchers, educators, designers, and makers for the exploration of making principles towards the acquisition of 21st Century learning competences, by employing the state of the art aspects of learning technologies, new media, gaming, robotics, toys and applications. Make2Learn aims to develop a critical discussion about the well-established practices and technologies of the maker movement, and expected outcomes of putting them into practice under different spaces such as Hackerspaces, Makerspaces, TechShops, FabLabs etc. This will allow us to better understand and improve the value of Maker philosophy and the role of entertainment technologies to support teaching and learning.


Author Keywords
Maker movement; learning technologies; creativity; knowledge construction; technological fluency; constructionist.

Introduction
Digital artifacts that enable people to exchange, create, and distribute information have, in the past couple of decades, profoundly reshaped the way we work and live [8]. The creative production of digital artifacts and use of entertainment technologies in learning activities has been linked to teaching new computer and design literacy skills [2]. Common inspiration is the work of Papert [7] that stresses the importance of creating a 'felicitous' environment to facilitate learning. The idea here is that the students benefit from being happy and in a carefree and creative environment. In accordance with Papert, Csikszentmihalyi's [4] research has exhibited that students' motivation is highly predictive of achievement; however, educational systems neglect creative and joyful aspects on learning activities. Educational programmes focus on recall and reproduction abilities instead of emphasizing the development of problem solving, creative thinking and decision-making abilities.
Digital artifacts have the potential to make the symbolic and abstract manipulations involved in creative procedures more concrete and manageable for young stu-dents [3]. For example, artifacts allow students to learn by iteratively testing, rebuild-ing their designs and working collaboratively. The interactions between the young students and the artifacts in creative and joyful activities are vital [5]. During the past decade, we have seen an increased appearance of environments and community spaces offering diverse opportunities for young students to facilitate learning through construction. Environments like Scratch, Alice and Storytelling Alice and spaces like Hackerspaces, Makerspaces, TechShops, and FabLabs have allowed researchers to empirically investigate the potential benefits of the maker movement towards the acquisition of 21st Century learning competences. Collecting and discussing around those advances will allow us to formulate better understanding of several technical and practical aspects that could be valuable in designing effective making activities to foster joyful engagement and creativity in learning.

Objectives
The advances of digital environments, learning technologies, manufacturing equipment and community spaces offer diverse opportunities for making practices to facilitate learning, especially when supported by engaging and joyful technologies and designed in an appropriate pedagogical manner. From current research, it is difficult to tell what aspects of environments, engaging technologies, applications, equipment and practices can have a positive impact.
The current drive in many countries to teach design and technology competences to all has potential to empower and support making as a creative, joyful and problemsolving tasks. However, there are a number of challenges in ensuring that procedures, tools and environments, embody appropriate progression and engender motivation and joyful. This workshop will attempt to address these key research challenges.
One of our main objectives is to bring together researchers, educators, designers who are interested for the exploration of making principles and supportive entertainment technologies towards the acquisition of 21st Century learning competences. Make2Learn aims to provide an environment where participants will get opportunities to: develop their research skills; increase their knowledge base; collaborate with others in their own and complementary research areas; and discuss their own work.
1. Accelerate research on Maker Movement by proposing ways to create greater interest and synergies among researchers, educators, students, policymakers, and industrial developers, 2. Promote rigorous multidimensional and multidisciplinary methods and implement rigorous experimentation strategies and metrics for in-depth longitudinal case studies,

Short bios of the organizers
Michail N. Giannakos is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His research interests focus on the design and study of emerging technologies and pedagogies in online and hybrid education settings, and their relationship to student and instructor experiences and practices. His research interests center on making sense of users experiences and practices in order to redesign and optimize the education settings and systems. His goal is to understand why and how learners and scholars use technologies in the ways that they do. Dr. Giannakos has developed and experimented with learning environments since 2008, and since that time has authored more than fifty manuscripts published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He has worked at several research projects funded by diverse sources like EC, Microsoft Research, NSF and Cheng Endowment; Giannakos is also a recipient of a Marie Curie fellowship.
Monica Divitini is professor of cooperation technologies at NTNU. Prof. Dr. Divitini has more than 20 years active experience in research with focus on technology enhanced learning, cooperation technology, mobile and ubiquitous computing, user-centred design approaches. In her research, she has investigated innovative learning methods enhanced by technology, with focus on training outside the classroom and in the workplace through e.g. game-based and reflective learning. She has extensive experience as participant and manager of EU and national projects in research areas relevant to this proposal. She was recently project leader for the national FABULA project, on citywide collaborative learning; unit responsible for EU IST FP7 IP MIRROR on reflective learning; and unit responsible for EU LLP2010 CoCreat, on development of Collaborative Spaces for Creativity in learning. She serves in the editorial board and program committee of various journals and conferences. She has co-organized various workshops in areas relevant to the proposal.

Dissemination activities, expected participants and practical information
The call for papers and participation will be distributed in several research communities, including CHI, IDC, TCLT, CSCW, and the learning sciences community. In addition, we will develop a workshop webpage which will be used to advertise the workshop and to provide related information regarding workshop focus, submission and attendance. We also plan to promote the workshop through a selection of PC members, the PC members and the organizers will advertise the workshop through related mailing lists (i.e., CHI, ISLS, TCLT), posted on proper sites (i.e., Kaleidoskope, wikicfp) and will proactively ask potential participants to submit a paper. PC members with whom we have long collaboration will assist in promoting the workshop and reviewing the submitted papers.
Make2Learn was first organized at the International Conference on Entertainment Computing. Information related to the PC members as well as the selected papers [11] and publications can be found on the respective website:

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Make2Learn 2015: http://make2learn.wix.com/icec2015 Papers will be published online as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series. In addition, we aim to publish the extended versions of the workshop papers to a special issue (e.g., IJCCI). All presentations from Workshop participants will be made available online through the Workshop Web site.
Workshop intents to have 15-20 participants; with focused interaction among participants, so participants will have informed positions and access to the accepted papers. Papers will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and the assistance of an international PC committee. We plan to have at least three reviewers for each submission, so that the organizers can use their own background as well as at least two PC members will assist us to make decisions regarding the final program of the workshop.