ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of gender in youth's engagement with e-textile making activities and their willingness to take on particular making identities. It focuses to better understand how students initially align with these gendered cultural histories of crafting, coding, and engineering, and also how designing e-textiles might shift how students align with cultural narratives. E-textile construction kits, like all tools and technologies, bring cultural histories that need to be taken into consideration if people want to understand the challenges as well as opportunities in broadening participation in making with e-textiles. E-textiles combine the low-tech dichotomy by integrating different traditions of gender-natured work and illuminate some of the challenges of creating appealing making activities for youth of all genders. The school attracts students from diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds who are already interested in STEM fields, providing a compelling space for studying making activities.
