Maker Identity Development: What and How?

Focusing on developing maker-identities, especially for historically marginalized students in the computational field, can empower them to recognize and take ownership of their space in the field. Drawing from identity related literature in maker and computing related fields we identified seven factors of maker-identity - interest and motivation, competence and performance, confidence and self-efficacy, recognition, utility value and meaningfulness, perceptions of community, and external factors. Using this, we analyzed semi-structured interviews of students who participated in our summer makerspace camp to understand how these identity factors manifested in their reflections of the camp. We tie back our findings of positive impacts on maker-identity structures to the design structures of our makerspace such as co-design of the space, use-modify-create strategies, and open-ended design projects.