Play culture across makerspaces: Connecting into a global makerspace online

In: Global studies of childhood: GSC, Band 10, Heft 3, S. 231-247

Abstract

This article is based on a school experiment of three local makerspaces that connected and turned into a global makerspace online. The three municipal schools were from Australia, United Kingdom and Denmark and participated in the Global Makerspace project, which was a part of the European Union project Makerspaces in the early years: Enhancing digital literacy and creativity. The Global Makerspace project was conducted over 4 days in the Autumn 2018. The schools' participating teachers and pupils belonged to the first years of primary level. In this article, the Danish experiences from the project are explored. The data collection analysed draws on a micro-ethnographic study of the experiences from the Danish makerspace completed by the Danish facilitator from the project Makerspaces in the early years: Enhancing digital literacy and creativity. The article identifies the teachers' and pupils' maker activities out from a play cultural point of view and reckon making as connecting to describe how offline maker communities connected into one online maker community. The baseline of the school experiment was to explore and stress the potential of how communities like teachers and pupils across time and space in collaboration can transform and develop play cultures with different combinations of technologies by sharing local maker activities into global activities online.