How To Help Your Child Become a Maker

Maker Kids:

Parents often ask us, how can I make my child a maker? Well the answer is, you can’t. They have to “make” their own decision to become a maker. What is a maker, you might ask? It’s just like it sounds: a maker is someone who makes things. In recent years, there has been a cultural renaissance going back to the age where many people made things themselves rather than buying them at a store or on a website themselves. People are tinkering with their computers, making websites, and in general feeling the benefits that making can bring you – confidence, meeting new people, and more We’ve seen the emergence of Make Magazine, Maker Faires (attended by hundreds of thousands of people in cities worldwide), and maker companies such as Arduino (an open source hardware prototyping platform), the Pebble smartwatch (which was prototyped on Arduino), and marketplaces to facilitate enterprise for these makers – such as Kickstarter or Etsy. We decided to jump into the mix with a kids’ makerspace called MakerKids, figuring that since childhood is the most formative stage in life, it’s the perfect time to equip them with the soft skills and technical know-how to help them become leaders of the 21st century.