Promoting student creativity and entrepreneurship through real-world problem-based maker education

Creativity and entrepreneurship are two interconnected competencies, as entrepreneurship promotes and results from creative practice. Making activities that involve real-world problems can help students develop these competencies. Although the engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate (5E) learning cycle for scientific activities has been viewed as an effective instructional strategy for promoting students’ learning engagement and academic gain, few researchers have applied this framework to examine the process of students’ creativity and entrepreneurship development. In this case study, we explored how a maker program integrated with real-world problems fostered four dimensions of students’ creativity and three areas of students’ entrepreneurship from the perspective of the 5E learning cycle. Seventy Grade 9 students (15–16 years old) from a K–12 school in Hong Kong participated in the 5-month maker program. Curriculum documents, activity video recordings, interviews, and student digital media products were collected to facilitate data triangulation. The qualitative data were analyzed using content analysis. The study found that the students’ creativity and entrepreneurship were scaffolded in a variety of ways throughout the learning cycle. We describe the innovative efforts made by researchers and suggest an instructional approach for teachers and instructional designers to assess student creativity and entrepreneurship during the five stages of the real-world problem-based maker program.