ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a preschool maker project that illustrates the potential of Design Playshop, a model people developed to support playful and expanded learning in makerspaces, communities of makers creating with materials in a physical place. In the hum of activity in a sunny preschool classroom, young children bend intently over their projects on the small table strewn with Squishy Circuit kits: maker kits for crafting working electric circuits with playdough "wires", battery packs, and LEDs, fans, or buzzers. A collaborative orientation supports shared knowledge production and distribution; helping and showing others are valued as ways to spread knowledge among makers. The study of collaborative playful design and technology learning illuminates the educational potential of play for expanding learning environments. The interest-driven, equitable, and engaged learning that a play-based model facilitates is particularly relevant to makerspaces that merge rigorous science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning with creative innovation in the arts (STEAM).
