It's very close to the ideas of the progressive education movement of Kerschensteiner and others.
You may find these articles interesting:
Dougherty, D. (2012). Makerspaces in Education and DARPA. O'Reilly. Retrieved from http://blog. makezine. com/2012/04/04/makerspaces-ineducation-and-darpa/on September, 13, 2012.
Tanenbaum, J. G., Williams, A. M., Desjardins, A., & Tanenbaum, K. (2013, April). Democratizing technology: pleasure, utility and expressiveness in DIY and maker practice. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2603-2612). ACM.
Weinmann, J. (2014). Makerspaces in the university community. Retrieved August, 21, 2015.
Wang, D., Dunn, N., & Coulton, P. (2015). Grassroots maker spaces: a recipe for innovation?.
Bowden, J. J. (2016). Who Makes a Makerspace? Makerspace Governance in Toronto, Ontario, and London, Ontario (Doctoral dissertation, McGill University Montreal (Quebec) Canada).
I hope this is useful.
I just attended the Mini Maker Faire in Madison, Wisconsin, where our local public libraries are fundraising to create maker spaces in the school district. They might be a good resource for you, if you are looking at creating them in primary and secondary schools: http://madisonbubbler.org/makingspaces
Makerspace is an “old wine, in a new bottle” concept. Kids have been doing something similar, finding boxes or other castoffs, using them to fulfill their imaginations. Hackers do the same thing in a much wider context. A designated space with an inventory of stuff, confines the maker hence limiting the range of solutions.
@Noreen Siddiqui great!!! Thank you for the recommendation. How was your experience attending the mini maker faire? How to replicate it in your school?
@William I am totally agree with you. But if you ask me why now, or why again the interest of maker movement in education I can say the renewed interest of STEAM education, communities of practices and shared economy. In addition to the emerging of new technologies that combine digital and physical systems like 3d printers, makey makey, lilypad, laser cuttets, etc. In higher education it could be an excelent opportunity to develop entrepreneurship education and to bring our ideas to solve real world problems.
@Oswaldo Castro-Romero. Hope it's helpful! It was my first Maker Faire and I was very impressed. Many of the booths were geared towards young kids. It seemed like a great way to get kids interested in science and technology. There were quite a few science and engineering groups from different local colleges and universities.
I think the way to possibly replicate this is to get student groups and departments to host booths. The biggest challenge might be to attract college students who aren't already interested in science or technology.
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