Wood Shop Enters the Age of High-Tech

You remember wood shop. You made that swan-shaped planter your parents pretended to like. And then you moved on.

These days, tinkering is a bit more high tech. The blending of technology and craft in tools like 3-D printers and laser cutters has made it possible for ordinary people to make extraordinary things. And many ordinary people, living as they do, more and more in their heads and online, are yearning to do something with their hands.

So the “maker space” movement — D.I.Y. communities to get people creating, be it for fun, for art or for entrepreneurship — is booming. Maker Faires are held around the world. Commercial operations like TechShop have popped up across the country. And tinkering is being promoted on college campuses from M.I.T. to Santa Clara University, as well as in high schools and elementary schools.

There’s even a massive open online course, offered by the MOOC provider Coursera and taught by three scientists from the Exploratorium in San Francisco, called “Tinkering Fundamentals: A Constructionist Approach to STEM Learning.”

Yes, tinkering is now a pedagogy.

Taking things apart and putting them together — skills children used to absorb in Dad’s or Mom’s workshop — has an important role to play in learning, according to Karen Cator, the chief executive of Digital Promise, a nonprofit organization created by Congress that focuses on the use of technology to improve education. “You’re exploring creativity, you’re exploring design thinking, you’re developing a sense of persistence,” she said. Building something new requires planning, trying and, yes, failing, and then trying again.

“These are incredibly important mind-sets for today’s world,” she said.

Ms. Cator, who served in the Department of Education during the first Obama term, talked excitedly about students who have designed child prostheses. “That’s what they’re going to remember their entire life,” she said. “They aren’t going to remember sitting in an electronics lecture.”

At Rutgers, a bustling maker space can be found in a moldering wood-frame structure on the Livingston campus in Piscataway, N.J. The building once served as the command headquarters for Camp Kilmer, a transportation hub for soldiers mobilizing for World War II; today, the building, still called Headquarters, houses computer repair offices and the division of continuing studies. And upstairs, there are wonders.

On any given day, as many as 20 students could be working on the array of equipment that the center offers training on and time to use, said Stephen M. Carter, who directs the university’s Center for Innovation Education and co-founded the New Jersey Makerspace Association in 2012. Students might be working on a class project, doing “something entrepreneurial” or making Halloweencostumes, he said. “We support all of it.”