Diving into practice with children and undergraduates: A cultural historical approach to instantiating making and tinkering activity in a designed learning ecology

"Making and Tinkering" has become popular in informal education circles. The practice links science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning (STEM) to the do-ityourself "maker" movement, where people of all ages "create and share things in both the digital and physical world" (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013). This paper examines a cultural historical approach to Making and Tinkering at two sites of El Pueblo Mágico (EPM), a social design experiment that joins university students, researchers and k-8 youth from predominately non-dominant communities together in joint activity for expansive and consequential learning (Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010). In the lineage of design experiments in the learning sciences our work addresses what Resnick and Rosenbaum discuss as the critical importance of designing contexts for tinkerability from a theory-based and iterative design approach that aims to both understand and change practice. With our work we seek to re-mediate normative STEM learning contexts for youth from non-dominant communities.