It surveys how this term is defined in the published literature — what the sources agree on, where they diverge and what remains contested — and carries its own numbered bibliography. It does not describe what we run. Programme policy is on the core pages.
Our own use of the word is often narrower than general usage; the short definition and the boundary are in the glossary, under Open making. The review date below matters, because the literature moves.
A definitional review. Citations follow IEEE style; see References.
Abstract
Open making is unstructured, self-directed, peer-driven time in a making environment, as against structured instruction. It appears in the literature under several names and is treated as a distinct pedagogical mode rather than merely the absence of teaching. This article sets out the terms in use, the discriminating feature, the benefits claimed for the mode, the equity critique — the best-developed critical strand, and one aimed squarely at the mode’s core premise — and the finding that open and structured making are complementary rather than opposed.
I. Definition
There is no single agreed term. The literature refers to the same broad mode as open studio time, drop-in and open-ended programming, free or self-directed making, and, by setting rather than method, informal or non-formal learning.
These function as distinct programme formats. Practitioner surveys list “open studio time for youth” and “drop-in programs for youth” as options separate from “courses or classes” and “workshops” [1]. A systematic review of library makerspace research records maker programming offered “as drop-in sessions, librarian-led programs, or open-ended programs” — the three named as alternatives to one another [2].
The definitional core is who authors the work: in open making the learner sets the goal, the sequence and the stopping point, and the educator does not. Smolarczyk and Kröner state the consequence the rest of the literature keeps returning to: in non-formal settings “the decision to participate in maker activities is self-initiated, and voluntary. At the same time, participation is a precondition for empowerment” [3].
II. Origins
Open making is not an invention of the maker movement but the current form of a much older argument.
The lineage runs through constructionism, where, as Vossoughi et al. summarise it, “the role of the teacher within constructionist pedagogical designs is generally to facilitate engagement with new tools using a process of making projects that reflect learners’ interests,” and where constructionist approaches “are often contrasted with direct forms of teaching” [4].
Blikstein and Valente place the dispute older still. The first recurring question makerspaces raise for schools, they write, is “How much open-endedness should we allow in schools?” — traceable to the fact that “one fundamental issue still divides the world of education like no other: the infamous dilemma of instruction versus construction,” running from Dewey and Montessori through Papert and Freire on one side and direct-instruction traditions on the other [5].
The practical exemplar most often invoked is the tinkering studio, where, as reported by Zhang, learners “spend on ideas for an hour, sometimes half a day, and many of them return regularly as the theme changes” [6].
III. What distinguishes open making
The discriminating feature is learner authorship of the problem — not the physical setting, the informality of the tone, or the presence of hand tools.
This matters because adjacent terms are routinely substituted for it. Tinkering names a manner of engaging with materials; informal learning names a setting; project-based learning names a structure in which the curriculum sets the goal. A drop-in library session and a themed classroom project may both be hands-on, use the same equipment and be equally enjoyable; they differ in whether the problem, the sequence and the endpoint are learner-authored.
It follows that open making is not the property of out-of-school settings. The 2017 makerspace survey found open studio time offered by 65% of school-based makerspaces against 57% of out-of-school ones, and drop-in programming at roughly half of each [1]. The mode crosses the formal/informal boundary in both directions.
IV. What the evidence reports
A. Agency and self-direction
The most-cited benefit claim comes from Project Zero’s Agency by Design initiative. Interviewing maker educators across schools, libraries, museums and after-school programmes, the team found “the learning outcomes these educators describe have less to do with the development of skills, and more to do with the development of self and community.” Practitioners described students learning “to pursue their own passions and become self-directed learners, proactively seeking out knowledge and resources on their own,” to persist, to treat failure as opportunity, and to see themselves as capable of effecting change [7].
The project names the target disposition maker empowerment: “a sensitivity to the designed dimension of objects and systems, along with the inclination and capacity to shape one’s world through building, tinkering, re/designing, or hacking” [7]. Its evidentiary status should be read carefully — this is a preliminary white paper reporting practitioner interviews and action research, and says so.
B. Interest-driven engagement
Zhang argues play, fun and interest are constitutive rather than incidental, and that this is “the difference between Making and many other activities constrained by external requirements, such as a robot competition.” The proposed mechanism is a loop: intrinsic motivation raises engagement, engagement raises perceived ability, perceived ability raises self-efficacy, which sustains engagement [6]. The observational counterpart appears in the library review, which reports an ethnography of a state-library meetup group finding patrons’ learning behaviours were “intrinsically motivated, self-directed, and socially interconnected with each other” [2].
C. Peer learning
Peer support is claimed as a defining feature rather than a by-product. Practitioners in the Agency by Design study described students learning “to learn together synchronously and asynchronously, in real as well as virtual environments, and from a wide variety of people, including their peers” [7]. In surveyed makerspaces, peer assessment — critique or guided comments by a fellow participant — was in use at a third of sites [1].
The qualification comes from the equity literature. Vossoughi et al., describing a child who circulates the room and joins another child’s circuit investigation, argue such peer relations “have a history” and must be “carefully developed and documented rather than taken for granted as an innate feature of making environments” [4].
D. The equity critique: self-direction as meritocracy
This is the sharpest criticism of the mode, and it is aimed at its core premise. Vossoughi, Hooper and Escudé argue the field’s focus on the transparency of tools rather than of pedagogy “suggests that high-quality making activities will themselves serve as the teacher within a process of self-directed learning. In our view, self-directed learning can easily slip into a meritocratic, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps approach to education” [4].
They demonstrate the mechanism by narrating one recorded episode twice. In the first telling, a seven-year-old’s circuit investigation is reported as an individual learning process and its success attributed to him. In the second, the same moments are shown to be jointly produced with a teacher who reframed his statement and explained the battery tester that triggered his next investigation. The authors’ point concerns what happens when the activity goes badly: “had Arthur had a difficult time with the activity (as was sometimes the case), the focus on his individual learning process could easily turn into a story of Arthur’s struggles rather than an examination of the pedagogical supports and relationships available in the environment” [4]. A second child’s disengagement, invisible in the first telling, is in the second attributed to the support he did not receive that day — which is what prompted staff to change their practice [4].
The general form of the argument is that “an overreliance on child-centered pedagogies that emphasize the avoidance of direct assistance overlooks the powerful role intentional teaching can play” [4]. The same authors extend it to how equity itself is framed: designs animated by “access” and “inclusion” tend to set seemingly neutral learning goals implicitly rooted in the experience of dominant populations, then seek to broaden participation, “thereby limiting equity to outreach and diversified participation rather than the critical examination and potential reorganization of the activities and pedagogies themselves” [4].
E. Open time presupposes prior access
The most concrete evidence that unstructured exploration is not equally available comes from a physical-computing workshop with twelve students aged 13–15 at a high school in India [8].
The authors document a high monetary and psychological cost to exploration: after one group damaged a temperature sensor through a wiring error, its members “could not be motivated to continue their project and did not want to work with another temperature sensor.” The same reluctance appeared in software, where failure is reversible — despite explicit assurance they could not damage the code, participants “did not engage in much free-form code exploration” [8].
They document limited independent learning resources: with no internet access, no reference texts and teachers unfamiliar with programmable electronics, four of six groups proposed the same servomotor fan, and a group that finished could not generate a further idea until the researcher supplied one [8].
They document the problem of intellectual courage: students schooled in rigid, textbook-centred settings “focus on following the teacher instead of independently exploring an educational concept,” and one group declined to extend its circuit when invited to explore [8].
Together these say that free exploration is not free. It draws on prior exposure, tolerance for material failure, and out-of-setting resources — all unequally distributed.
F. Self-selection into voluntary settings
Because participation in open, non-formal making is voluntary, who turns up is itself an outcome. Smolarczyk and Kröner’s scoping review of 180 publications on digital making with children and adolescents found fostering equity to be the single largest research topic (n = 30) [3].
The reviewed studies establish that particular groups must be deliberately recruited rather than merely admitted: there is “a need to address certain groups of young people in particular and motivate them to participate voluntarily (e.g., girls, or children from marginalized communities)” [3]. One study found a FabLab was an unfamiliar location constituting “a major hurdle to participate,” and that embedding workshops in existing organisations and in established informal adult–adolescent relationships “substantially lowered the participation hurdle” [3]. The review also collects the design principles offered in response — mobility, a diversity of materials, openness of the location, and activities with “low floors, high ceilings and wide walls” that are easy to start yet offer growth potential and multiple pathways [3]. These are all forms of deliberate structure applied to make openness usable.
G. Choice without structure can stall
An interview study of maker educators in independent schools found teachers converging on a middle setting. Rather than complete free choice they set a theme “within which significant leeway was permitted,” believing “this helped those students for whom complete free choice seemed more paralyzing”; the resulting projects were easy to enter but had “unlimited growth potential” [9]. One teacher describes the distribution directly: “when it’s so open-ended I get a few kids that really want to go off and do their own thing. And then everybody else is just like, I don’t know, just tell me what to…” [9]. This is the equity critique restated from the practitioner’s side — open time rewards learners who arrive already confident enough to use it.
H. The two modes are complementary
The literature does not conclude that open making should be replaced by instruction. It converges instead on combination. Vossoughi et al. describe investigations conducted in physical, digital and fabricated forms, “each open-ended enough for personalized expression yet structured enough for scaffolding toward specific ideas,” and argue for a view of pedagogy admitting “moments when explicit forms of teaching are appropriate and generative” [4].
Valente and Blikstein reach the same place from constructionist premises. Their observation of school makerspaces is that “the activities are restricted to product construction, and the students are not engaged in activities that are important for the construction of knowledge”; it is “impractical to think that they will be able to construct knowledge individually, without being aided by others,” and makerspaces need teachers or more experienced people acting as mediators who challenge learners and help them conceptualise what they have done [10].
The structural evidence is consistent. A scoping review of 68 studies of making with students aged 9–13 found activities commonly unfold across three phases — inspiration and preparation, implementation and creation, presentation and recontextualisation — in which the open creative phase is bracketed by structured phases on either side [11].
A final caution runs the other way: structure is not automatically the higher-reach option. The library review reports a study in which group workshops had low attendance and “appeared to impact fewer users than online tutorials and individual consultations” [2].
V. Scope of adoption
Open making is close to ubiquitous as a programme format. Open studio time was offered by 60% of the 48 surveyed makerspaces and drop-in programming by 48%, placing both among the most common formats alongside courses and classes (81%) and community events (63%) [1].
Its research base is far thinner than its adoption. The library makerspace review found qualitative, descriptive studies predominant and explicit theoretical frameworks “less used,” and identified very few studies of school and rural library makerspaces — the settings where the resourcing assumptions behind open access are least likely to hold [2]. The digital-making scoping review reports “a great demand for empirical studies with experimental designs” [3].
VI. Limitations
The construct is not operationalised. No source reviewed here defines how much learner control makes a session open. “Open studio time” and “drop-in” are categories self-reported by sites on a survey form [1], not measured conditions, so the prevalence figures describe labels rather than practices.
There is almost no comparative evidence. None of the sources reviewed reports a controlled comparison of open against structured making on a common outcome. The agency and self-direction claims rest largely on practitioner interviews in a preliminary white paper [7]; both systematic reviews name the absence of experimental designs and theoretical frameworks as the field’s principal gap [2], [3].
Benefit claims and constraint findings come from different populations. The strongest benefit claims are drawn from well-resourced settings, while the sharpest documented constraints on self-directed exploration come from a low-resource school with no internet access and no reference materials [8]. The literature does not establish how far either finding transfers to the other’s setting.
Self-selection is unresolved. Participation in voluntary settings is both the precondition for the outcomes studied and itself socially patterned [3]. No reviewed study separates the effect of the pedagogical mode from the composition of the group it attracts, so observed benefits of open making may in part be properties of who chooses to attend.
The complementarity finding is a recommendation, not a result. The three-phase structure describes what the reviewed studies happened to report, and the same review notes “a lack of research on how teachers scaffold transitions between these phases or adapt them for students with diverse learning needs” [11]. The blend the literature recommends has not itself been tested.
Terminological instability limits synthesis. Free making, open studio, drop-in, self-directed making and informal learning are used across this literature for overlapping but non-identical things, and no source reviewed here reconciles them. Aggregate claims about “open” making should be read as claims about a family of practices rather than a single one.
References
[1] K. Peppler, A. Keune, F. Xia, and S. Chang, “Survey of Assessment in Makerspaces,” Open Portfolio Project Research Brief 17, Maker Ed, 2018.
[2] S. H. Kim, Y. J. Jung, and G. W. Choi, “A systematic review of library makerspaces research,” Library and Information Science Research, vol. 44, no. 4, 101202, 2022.
[3] K. Smolarczyk and S. Kröner, “Two Decades in the Making: A Scoping Review on Research on Digital Making and its Potential for Digital Empowerment in Non-formal Settings,” Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 2021, doi: 10.1080/15391523.2021.1974987.
[4] S. Vossoughi, P. K. Hooper, and M. Escudé, “Making Through the Lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity,” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 86, no. 2, pp. 206–232, 2016.
[5] P. Blikstein and J. A. Valente, “Professional Development and Policymaking in Maker Education: Old Dilemmas and Familiar Risks,” Authors’ Response, Constructivist Foundations, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 268–271, 2019.
[6] D. Zhang, “STEM Education through Making: What Are Affordances and Challenges of Making Out of School Club?” Open Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 9, no. 9, 2021, doi: 10.4236/jss.2021.99042.
[7] Agency by Design, “Maker-Centered Learning and the Development of Self: Preliminary Findings of the Agency by Design Project,” White Paper, Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, USA, Jan. 2015.
[8] S. Somanath, L. Oehlberg, J. Hughes, E. Sharlin, and M. Costa Sousa, “‘Maker’ within Constraints: Exploratory Study of Young Learners using Arduino at a High School in India,” in Proc. CHI Conf. Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘17), Denver, CO, USA, 2017, doi: 10.1145/3025453.3025849.
[9] K. O’Connell Bird, “Making Space: Teacher Perceptions of How Participation and Choice are Mediated within Maker Education in Independent Schools,” Ed.D. dissertation, Graduate School of Education, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2021.
[10] J. A. Valente and P. Blikstein, “Maker Education: Where Is the Knowledge Construction?” Constructivist Foundations, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 252–262, 2019.
[11] M. Cotnam-Kappel, S. Neisary, M. Schira Hagerman, A. Cattani-Nardelli, and P. N. Labelle, “Making in the Middle Years: A Scoping Review Exploring Outcomes of Maker Activities in Educational Contexts for Students and Teachers,” Journal of Digital Life and Learning, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 1–29, 2025, doi: 10.51357/jdll.v5i2.326.