ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how making - in particular, tinkering and fiddling around with creative projects - can help people in becoming more computationally literate. It investigates what makes tinkering useful, what aspects of making specifically involve tinkering, why computational literacy can be valuable, and what aspects of computational literacy may most help budding makers. The chapter follows diSessa in defining computational literacy as consisting of three component aspects: material, social, and cognitive. Material computational literacy can be defined as making things with computation - primarily programming and electronics. The chapter discusses computational thinking. The practice of tinkering in making - the playful fiddling that characterizes a lot of the fun in hobby engineering - can be a principled and theoretically sound way to gain expertise with complex technical content. The notion of constructionism also underlies many of the more successful efforts in the Maker Movement. Computational participation helps both the maker and the people for whom the maker is making.
