Making in the Middle Years: A Scoping Review Exploring Outcomes of Maker Activities in Educational Contexts for Students and Teachers

As generative AI reshapes the educational landscape, schools face pressing questions about how to foster more agentive, collaborative, and interdisciplinary learning. This scoping review synthesizes insights from 68 research articles exploring maker-centered projects conducted with students from grades four to eight (age 9-13) in educational contexts. Analyses synthesize key design elements that shape effective making activities for students of this age group that follow what we identify as a three as a three-phase structure of implementation: 1) inspiration and preparation, 2) implementation and creation, and 3) presentation and recontextualization. This paper also reports on the outcomes of making for both students and teachers. Our findings suggest that making, as an intervention for students, supports a range of important disciplinary, social, affective, and metacognitive outcomes. For teachers, engaging in maker-centered learning enables pedagogical decisions that move them away from traditional, teacher-centered practices and toward experimental, self-directed and collaborative pedagogies tailored to student needs. Additionally, findings of both affective and social outcomes were also reported for teachers. In an era of rapid technological change, evidence from this study suggests that making creates meaningful and impactful learning opportunities for students and teachers that can be tailored to students’ social, developmental, and cultural strengths and needs.