Due to all my experience as a public-school teacher in Brazil, I am sure about the importance of the maker culture in the teaching and learning process.

I have always considered the maker culture as a great umbrella for working with innovation, as it allows the work with embroidery, sewing, programming, robotics, artificial intelligence, IoT (Internet of Things), among others, to be developed with the hands, different areas of knowledge and active methodologies, and also investigative approaches such as STEAM.

Everything that was mentioned before coming with the opportunity to take the students out of passivity and place them at the center of the process, as the protagonists of their story. Over the course of my 17 years as a teacher and more recently the last 6 years as a technology teacher, I have experienced this in practice, seeing a transformation in teaching at school, as well as in the community itself, by bringing a real problem to be solved: garbage being transformed  into an object of knowledge.

From this central axis, I had the opportunity to see distracted students up close, identifying a new meaning for the school and the students; students being awakened to reading and writing; students overcoming racial, ethnographic issues.

This work done in Brazil became a public policy by allowing students coming from other social and economic realities to have access to robotics, work with scrap and today it is present in more than 5100 schools in the State of São Paulo, adding electronic components to unstructured materials, creativity in different constructions and everyday solutions.

I still have big questions about how to take the maker culture to all students and especially students from public schools, here in Brazil that suffers from the devaluation of teachers, infrastructure, and connectivity of public schools. We have around 180 thousand schools in the country, among which 45% do not have basic sanitation and 81% of the Brazilian students study in these schools.

It is for these students that the maker culture can make a difference in the teaching and learning process and motivate them to be critical, creative students, based on a comprehensive education that involves problems to be solved at school, the educational territory, and the school community.

It is important to have high technological resources, but it is essential, as teachers, that we take the first steps towards an education that makes sense in the world, develop skills and abilities, and prioritize students and teachers.

And you, how have you been inserting and integrating the maker culture into your classroom?