Interest Development and Learning in Choice-based

Interest Development and Learning in Choice-based, In-school, Making Activities: The Case of a 3D Printer Kay E. Ramey*, Reed Stevens School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, 2120 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208 *Corresponding author. Email Addresses: [email protected], [email protected]

2 Abstract Integrated STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) making activities have become increasingly popular in recent years. Many tout their benefits for STEAM interest development. However, we know relatively little about how these activities cultivate STEAM interests or about the relation between interest development and learning. This paper examines these issues in the context of one set of in-school, choice-based, STEAM making and learning environments, FUSE Studios. Drawing on sociocultural approaches to interest development, we present the case of one student’s interest pathway through FUSE. By the end of the schoolyear, this student had developed an interest in and was recognized as a relative expert at 3D printing. She also connected this interest in 3D printing to a career aspiration to “help cancer kids and become a doctor for them”. Drawing on ethnographic observations and microanalysis of videorecordings, we trace her year-long interest pathway through FUSE to understand how her interests, in interaction with the socio-material context of FUSE, shaped her learning. We argue that the choice-based nature of FUSE allowed her to pursue her interests, organize her own learning, and consequently, cultivate STEAM interests and learning.

Keywords: Interest, Learning, Makerspace, STEM, STEAM

3 1. Introduction Making activities and makerspaces have become explosively popular in recent years, in informal spaces such as museums, libraries, after school programs, community centers, and Maker Faires (Honey & Kanter, 2013). Although makerspaces primarily started as sites for entrepreneurship, there is increasing enthusiasm around makerspaces as sites for learning. Among the reasons for this is their potential to encourage STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) or STEAM (STEM plus arts/design) interest and identity development (e.g., Dixon & Martin, 2014; Dorphy & Cannady, 2014; Fields & King, 2014; Vossoughi & Bevan, 2014). For example, Fields and King (2014) found that participation in a college Craft Technologies course changed the way women viewed themselves and led them to take up new interests and practices. Dixon and Martin (2014) found that experienced Maker Faire participants reported more connections between making and long-term interests and aspirations than their less experienced counterparts. Finally, drawing on survey data from 25 different making programs, Dorph and Cannady (2014) found evidence that participation in such programs increased participants’ activation toward STEM, which they define as fascination with and valuing of STEM, competency belief, problem-solving, and creative thinking. Despite this emerging research suggesting that participation in making leads to STEM or STEAM-related interests, there is relatively little research examining: (1) how interests develop over time; (2) how they shape learning; or (3) how the designed socio-material contexts of making activities and makerspaces encourage or discourage interest and learning processes. We address this gap in prior literature by examining the relation between interest development and learning in one set of in-school, STEAM making and learning contexts, “FUSE Studios” (referred to throughout the text as “FUSE”). The analysis provided here seeks to both further an understanding of the relation between interest and learning in making and inform the design of

4 STEAM making and learning activities. It also represents a contribution to the broader literature on interest development and its relation to learning, particularly the literature which explores the role of sociocultural context in shaping young people’s interests (e.g., Anderhag, et al., 2016; Azevedo, 2013; Barron, 2006; Hollet, 2016). Speaking to the themes of this special issue, our analysis shows how a particular designed experience (FUSE) promotes interests by demonstrating how specific relationships and interactions afforded by the social and material context of FUSE support students in discovering, sustaining, and developing those interests. FUSE is a productive context in which to investigate interest development and its role in shaping learning, because, like many makerspaces, it is designed to be choice-based and interestdriven. Therefore, it has the potential to be a context where STEAM interests would develop and where we could see interest development through the choices that youth make. This contrasts with traditional schooling, where learning objectives and the pathways students follow to achieve those objectives are typically prescribed by teachers (e.g., Azevedo, 2013; Becker, 1972; Hall & Stevens, 1995; Mead, 1970; Paradise & Rogoff, 2009). Further, unlike many out-of-school makerspaces, FUSE typically takes place in school, often as a required class. So, for example, the fifth and sixth grade (10-12-year-old) students studied here participated in FUSE consistently for an entire schoolyear. As a result, FUSE allows us a unique lens into development happening over time.

1.1 A Sociocultural Framing on Interest and Learning In framing our investigation of interest development and learning, we draw on both theory and methods from prior sociocultural accounts of interest development. These approaches contrast with cognitive-psychological accounts of interest development, such as Hidi and Renniger’s (2006) four phase model, which frame interest as a psychological state triggered in

5 and possessed by an individual. For example, Hollet’s (2016) notion of interests in motion, frames interests as dynamic and mutually constituted by individuals’ interactions with multiple socio-material contexts over time. Similarly, Azevedo (2013) describes interests in terms of lines of practice comprised of the interaction between a person’s preferences and the conditions of practice presented by a particular context. Further, while Hidi and Renninger (2006) frame interest as tied to content, Azevedo emphasizes that the topic or domain of learning (e.g., science or STEAM) is not necessarily the focus of students’ work and interest development. Instead, people weave all sorts of preferences into ongoing and long-term activities of interest, and their interests are as likely to be tied to particular tools, social interactions, or practices, as to a disciplinary topic or learning goal. We have drawn on these sociocultural accounts of interest development by attending to the ways in which the choice-based nature of FUSE allows learners to construct their own interest pathways — dynamic, meandering lines of practice co-constructed by both individual interests and socio-material context. Here, we present the case of one student’s, Carmen’s, interest pathway, as an exemplar of the ways in which students’ interest pathways through FUSE, and the specific interests and practices that constitute them, allow them to produce their own learning. In analyzing Carmen’s case, we drew on Vygotsky’s notion of history, identifying a learning outcome, then examining the everyday activities in her individual history that produced that outcome (Vygotsky, 1966; Scribner, 1984). We also employed Marx’s notion of production – that “[humans] produce themselves and one another…by reciprocally laying down, through their life activities, the conditions for their own growth and development” (Ingold, 2011, p. 7, see also Marx & Engels, 1977) – to analyze how Carmen, in conversation with the social and material resources available to her in FUSE, produced her own learning. Finally, we drew on

6 Ingold’s (2011) notion of lines, tracing Carmen’s “trails of becoming” (p. 14) to understand how her interests shaped her learning. We also connect the prior work on interest development to similar sociocultural work on learning. For example, Stevens et al. (2008) analyzed the ways in which aspiring engineers moved through educational pathways, partially of their own making and partially constructed for them, taking both official and unofficial routes to their end goal. Similarly, Bell, et al. (2013), analyzed what they referred to as “cultural learning pathways – connected chains of personally consequential activity and sense-making – that are temporally extended, spatially variable, and culturally diverse with respect to value systems and social practices” (p. 270). In the same way that Ingold (2011) emphasized the need for tracing learners’ “multiple trails of becoming, wherever they lead” (p. 14), Bell, et al. (2013) wrote:

…we need to account for how individuals and groups arrange or transform the conditions of their own learning in relation to their expectations, interests, concerns, and available resources, as well as how such acts of agency and activity within situations are impeded, resisted, or even co-opted (p. 271).

In other words, as Stevens et al. (2008) argued, neither knowledge and skills, nor participation in prescribed educational pathways alone are sufficient to understand or predict educational outcomes. We must also account for the, often unexpected, directions in which individual interests lead and the ways in which they both shape and are shaped by socio-material context.

2. Method

7 2.1. Research Context Our research context, FUSE Studios, offers nearly 30 STEAM challenge sequences, which “level-up” like video games. Students complete levels of increasing difficulty, according to their interests, and self-document evidence of level completion to unlock new levels. Students view the gallery of challenges on the FUSE website (www.fusestudio.net), and each challenge has a trailer video to invite students’ interest in that challenge. Once students choose a challenge, they have access to challenge guidelines and help resources for that challenge. This is in addition to the resources available in the classroom, such as other students, physical and digital materials, and teachers, who are referred to as “facilitators” in FUSE. Challenges are pursued using a combination of open-source software programs, such as Sketchup or Inkscape, and physical tools and materials, such as 3D printers or circuit boards. Students can work individually or in pairs or groups and can stop and start challenges as they choose. Finally, in FUSE, there is no penalty for failure. If students don’t succeed the first time through a level, they can iterate on that level as many times as they want. In many ways, FUSE resembles out-of-school makerspaces. However, it is also different in important ways. First, although FUSE started in informal spaces, such as afterschool clubs and libraries, the FUSE studios observed for this research took place during the school day, as a required class. Second, FUSE is less focused on outfitting a space with cutting edge technology and more focused on creating a supportive infrastructure for learning. This infrastructure provides both more structure and support than open-ended makerspaces, where learners are simply let loose to explore available tools (e.g., Brahms, 2014; Sheridan et al., 2014) but also more choice than workshop-style making activities where all students do the same project or use the same tools (e.g., Fields & King, 2014; Peppler, 2013; Resnick et al., 2009). Finally, in contrast to the mentor-centric model employed in many makerspaces, in FUSE, the facilitator is

8 just one of many resources upon which students can draw. In fact, FUSE is designed to encourage students to seek assistance from peers or digital resources on the website before or instead of seeking help from adults in the room. In the analysis that follows, we argue that these characteristics of FUSE are consequential for the interest pathways it affords and the learning that occurs on those pathways. The analysis presented here draws on data collected in four FUSE studios, serving fifthand sixth-grade students. Each FUSE studio took place twice per week for 90 total minutes. They were all from one large, suburban, Midwestern school district, with a relatively racially and socioeconomically diverse student population.1 In this district, elementary school includes kindergarten to sixth grade. So, all of these classrooms were in elementary schools. At the time of data collection, only the five STEM-focused elementary schools in the district ran FUSE as an in-school and after-school program, whereas, the rest of the 22 elementary and middle schools in the district only had after-school FUSE club. The studios we observed come from four of these five STEM-focused elementary schools. Focal classrooms were chosen to achieve variability and representativeness on specific facilitator and student characteristics. First, to insure a representative picture of how students at different grade- and experience-levels participated in FUSE, our sample of focal classrooms included two fifth-grade classes, one sixth-grade class, and one mixed, fifth-sixth-grade class. Second, to insure a representative picture of how teachers with different amounts of experience and expertise facilitated FUSE, we included two classrooms with teachers who were new to FUSE (one fifth and one sixth), and two classrooms with teachers who had facilitated FUSE before (one fifth and one mixed fifth-sixth). Working with the district STEM coordinator, we

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The student population in this district is 31 percent low income and 22 percent English language learners. It is 42 percent white, 24.7 percent Latinx, 22.8 percent Asian, 6.3 percent black, 3.5 percent multiracial, 0.4 percent American Indian, and 0.2 percent Pacific Islander.

9 also identified teachers who had demonstrated more or less comfort with FUSE facilitation or epistemic alignment with the design goals of FUSE. The focal case presented and analyzed here comes from a fifth-grade studio, run by an experienced FUSE facilitator who had demonstrated relative comfort and epistemic alignment with FUSE. In addition to facilitating FUSE, he was the regular classroom teacher. He and his 20 students visited the FUSE studio twice per week for 45 minutes each time. At this school, as at the others in this district, FUSE took place in a computer lab that classes rotated into one at a time (See Figure 1).

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Figure 1. Layout of FUSE studio.

11 2.2. Data Collection and Analysis The analysis presented here draws on ethnographic observations conducted over the course of the entire 2015-16 schoolyear. A member of our team was present for all FUSE sessions, acting as a participant ethnographer – observing and taking field notes on students’ and facilitators’ behavior, but also interacting with them, asking questions, guiding them toward relevant resources, and relaying information back to our development team, regarding bugs in the website or missing or broken materials. In addition to taking field notes, during every visit, we recorded whole-room and pointof-view video. Whole-room video was captured using a tripod-mounted camera, positioned at the back of the classroom to capture as much classroom activity as possible, including students’ computer screens (see Figure 1). Point-of-view video was captured by up to six focal participants per class period, wearing small Go-Pro®, Drift®, or Mobius® cameras mounted on tennis visors. At the end of the schoolyear, we also conducted semi-structured interviews (Bernard, 1988) with focal students and facilitators to understand what they thought about FUSE, what they had learned, and what impact FUSE had had on students’ interests, and future aspirations. The analysis presented here integrates insights drawn from both our videoethnography and interviews with students and teachers. This approach has the advantage of providing both a process-based account of interest development and learning and students’ summative reflections on their interest pathways and experiences in FUSE, in their own words. In analyzing our data, we drew on a combination of iterative, categorical coding (e.g., Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and interaction analysis (e.g., Hall & Stevens, 2015; Jordan & Henderson, 1995). We operationalized interest as either explicit statements from learners or their choices to pursue (and continue pursuing) particular challenges or activities. Interest development was identified when we observed or students reported that their engagement with

12 that interest had changed or deepened over time. Finally, to identify moments of learning, we drew on Hutchins’ (1995) definition – that “learning is adaptive reorganization in a complex system” (p. 289) – identifying moments when students adaptively reorganized ideas, tools, or their interactions with one another. We identified these moments of adaptive reorganization through interaction analysis of knowledge in use (Hall & Stevens, 2015), displayed by students through talk or embodied action in interaction.

2.3. Selection of Focal Case We chose the case of one student, Carmen, as the focus of our analysis here for three reasons. First, because she regularly volunteered to wear a visor camera and agreed to be interviewed at the end of the year, we have considerable data on her (approximately 15 hours of video). Second, her interest pathway through FUSE is representative of a type of interest development and learning observed frequently in FUSE – students developing interests and relative expertise related to 3D printing, using that expertise to help others 3D-print, and becoming recognized by themselves, their teachers, and their peers as relative experts (Stevens et al., 2016). Finally, Carmen’s case demonstrates the ways in which the socio-material context of FUSE supports interest development and learning processes by allowing students to pursue their own interests and organize their learning experiences to produce their own learning.

3. Results By the end of the 2015-16 schoolyear, Carmen had developed an interest in and was recognized, by herself, her classmates, and her teachers, as a relative expert at 3D printing. She could frequently be observed helping other students 3D print, and she had connected her interest in 3D printing to both her identity as someone who enjoys helping others and to a career

13 aspiration to “help cancer kids and become a doctor for them”. But how did these interests develop? How did she acquire this expertise? How did 3D printing come to inform her emerging career aspirations? And how did the socio-material context of FUSE support these processes? In this section we present findings to answer these questions.

3.1. Early Interest Exploration Early in the year, Carmen expressed an interest in designing objects in a 3D CAD application, Tinkercad, and printing those objects using the 3D printer. This interest was expressed by choosing to do the Keychain Customizer challenge, which uses Tinkercad, and observing and asking questions of other students and the FUSE facilitator, Mr. Lewis, as they designed in Tinkercad, printed their designs, or engaged in troubleshooting with the 3D printer. For example, in early October, with the help of another student, Carmen first designed a keychain in Tinkercad (for full timeline, see Figure 2). However, she was told by that student that she could not print it, because they had a substitute teacher, and Mr. Lewis had to be there for them to print.

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Figure 2. Timeline of major events in Carmen’s interest pathway through FUSE.

The following week, when Mr. Lewis had returned and was helping another student, Anvi, print, Carmen spent almost the entire class period watching the printing process. She watched while Mr. Lewis pried the previous print job off the printing platform, changed the filament to a different color, and set up the printer for printing. She initially only observed and asked questions but later began offering help and answering questions posed by other students. For example, while Mr. Lewis changed the filament, Carmen read the directions on the printer screen. When the new purple filament started to come out through the printing nozzle, Anvi asked, “What is that?”, and

15 Carmen answered, “That's what makes it. That's your design? Oh it's purple! It melted the purple string?” Carmen’s words, paired with her gaze during this interaction (see Figure 3), indicate her intent interest in Mr. Lewis’ work with the 3D printer and the learning opportunity that her observations of this process provided her.

16 Figure 3. Video stills from Carmen’s visor camera as she observed Mr. Lewis change the filament cartridge (A) and guide the new filament into the printer (B), and the new filament came out of the printing nozzle (C).

Thus, early on, Carmen’s interest in the 3D printer, paired with the socio-material organization of the classroom (i.e., Mr. Lewis allowing students to observe him setting up and running the 3D printer) afforded Carmen an opportunity to organize her own learning (i.e., figuring out the role of filament in 3D printing) by engaging in a form of learning Paradise and Rogoff (2009) referred to as learning by observing and pitching in. This form of learning, though well-documented by Rogoff and colleagues in out-of-school contexts, has been explicitly contrasted by those scholars with the ways in which learning is typically arranged in schools. Therefore, it is notable that the FUSE context afforded Carmen the opportunity to pursue her interest and engage in learning about the 3D printer in this way.

3.2. From Observing and Pitching in to Being in Charge Over the following months, Carmen explored a handful of other FUSE challenges that didn’t involve the 3D printer. However, she kept gravitating back toward the printer, gaining skill and confidence though similar episodes of learning by observing and pitching in. Then, in early Spring, Carmen made an important shift, from observing and pitching in, to being in charge of the 3D printer. This transition was facilitated by two consequential shifts to the socio-material conditions of the FUSE activity system. First, after Mr. Lewis lost the SD card used to save and transport files to the printer, he placed the printer on a rolling cart so that it could be connected directly to a computer, via USB cable (thus linking the printer, through that computer, to the file server

17 where all students saved their work). Taking advantage of the fact that students were allowed to choose which desktop computer to work at each day, Carmen began working at the computer connected to the printer – meaning that any student who wanted to print had to enlist her assistance. The second consequential shift in the room came when Mr. Lewis was absent for two weeks, on paternity leave. In his absence, if anyone wanted to 3D print, someone else needed to take on his tasks, like fixing the 3D printer and managing the queue of students waiting to print. Since the substitute teacher had no experience with 3D printing, Carmen suddenly became the relative expert in the room and stepped into the role she later referred to as “master of the printer.” In her new role, Carmen helped others print, managed the queue of students waiting to print, and engaged in troubleshooting and maintenance of the printer. This provided opportunities for her to demonstrate and deepen her interest in and learning about the printer. For example, one day, Carmen helped Elena print by changing the printer filament to a different color and pulling up and inspecting Elena’s CAD file, to make sure that it would print properly, things she had previously observed Mr. Lewis doing. Later, when the printer malfunctioned, Elena enlisted Carmen’s help to fix it. The illustrated transcript in Figure 4 shows how Carmen diagnosed the problem.

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Figure 4. Carmen diagnoses a problem with the 3D printer, while helping Elena print.

19 In lines 1 and 11 of this transcript, Carmen presented a hypothesis as to the trouble with the printer (i.e., “…when it was pulling this in, it must have gotten a little bit tangled” and “Something got tangled right here in the string, and it wasn't going in through it”). After this episode, Carmen fixed the problem by unravelling some of the filament from the spool behind the printer, in order to untangle it, a solution she had previously observed Mr. Lewis use. Carmen’s ability to diagnose and fix a problem with the printer shows her technical knowledge and troubleshooting skills related to the printer. Her ability to help others with their print jobs and manage the print queue (line 7, “So do you want to print after Diego or do you want to print now, with ‘Focus’?”) shows collaboration and negotiation skills. The exchange between Carmen and Elena in lines 2-5, where Elena asked Carmen how to proceed (e.g., “Can I edit this?” and “I'm not going to print next week, unless I'm going, unless I go after Diego?”) shows Elena’s positioning of Carmen as the 3D printing authority. Finally, Carmen’s authoritative responses (e.g., “No you can't, Elena. Sorry…” and “You can go after Diego, right after Diego.”) show how she takes up that role. Later in this same class, Carmen demonstrated additional embodied skills and knowledge related to the 3D printer, by explaining to the substitute teacher how it worked (see Figure 5).

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Figure 5. Carmen explains to the substitute teacher how the 3D printer works.

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In this interaction, Carmen demonstrated her knowledge of the 3D printer, explaining how it worked (line 2), how long it would take to print (lines 2, 4, and 6), and what the procedure was for coming back and retrieving printed items once they’d finished (line 8, 10, and 12). She also demonstrated mathematical thinking — by estimating the amount of time remaining for the print job, based on the percent completion reported by the printer (lines 1 and 6) — and spatial thinking — by explaining how the printer builds a 3D object (lines 1 and 2). These moments of knowledge performance, though brief and ephemeral, are consequential, as they occurred in the context of practical activity. Therefore, they represent knowledge performed, not for an assessment – as is often the case in school – but for actual use. In this interaction, we can also see how the substitute repeatedly positioned Carmen as an expert, mentioning that she’d never seen a 3D printer “in action” before (line 1) and asking Carmen questions (lines 1, 3, 7, 9, 11) to which she seemed not to know the answers (rather than the type of known-answer questions often asked by teachers). This positioning continued in lines 13-17, when Carmen expanded her sharing of expertise to explaining that they only had five minutes left in class (line 14) and explaining the procedure for letting the class know that (flashing the lights, lines 14 and 16). As a result, the interaction concluded with the substitute recognizing Carmen’s expertise, saying “She needs to run the class not me” (line 17).

3.3. Becoming Recognized as a 3D Printing Expert When Mr. Lewis returned from paternity leave, Carmen did not abandon her role as master of the 3D printer, but rather maintained her position for the rest of the schoolyear, helping other students print and maintaining both the 3D printer and the print queue. Our observations suggest that this was because her emerging expertise and role as 3D printing master was

22 recognized and reinforced by Mr. Lewis, the other students in the class, and by Carmen herself. For example, the week after Mr. Lewis returned, another student, Diego, awarded Carmen with the class’s travelling “Engineer Award”, in recognition of her work with the 3D printer. Mr. Lewis had created this award – a yellow, 3D-printed wrench – earlier in the schoolyear and invited input from the class on a list of practices or characteristics that might earn someone the award (e.g., working hard, innovating, problem-solving, helping each other, and persevering). Each week, the previous winner of the wrench awarded it to a new student who had demonstrated those practices or characteristics in FUSE that week. In Carmen’s case, Diego awarded it to her, in recognition of her relative expertise at 3D printing and her use of that expertise to help other students print, saying, “I nominate Carmen, because how she was working hard and how she was like helping us and like pushing herself and as soon as something was wrong, she would fix it.” Mr. Lewis’ comments in his end-of-year interview suggested that he was also aware of Carmen’s new role in the room and intentionally allowed her to remain in that role, because he recognized her capacity and wanted to shift agency to students. The following excerpt describes his understanding of Carmen’s role and the development of expertise and confidence that accompanied it:

Carmen, she became like our 3D printer guru. You know, she was the one that you would go to with any 3D printer issue. She could change it. She could do it, and she had the help of other students who would help her out. You know, she would ask for other students' help too. And you know, in class, she might not always show that confidence. Um, you know, she likes to participate, but you can tell with her answers sometimes, there’s not

23 the confidence, whereas here at FUSE, when it came to 3D printing, Carmen could tell you with confidence.

This excerpt demonstrates that Mr. Lewis recognized Carmen’s relative expertise with the 3D printer and her ability to collaborate with others. It also shows his recognition of the contrast between her confidence in FUSE, in relation to the 3D printer, and her lack of confidence in the regular classroom. Later in his interview, Mr. Lewis explained what it was about FUSE that he thought led to different forms of engagement for Carmen (and other students) in FUSE than in the regular classroom, saying:

The traditional classroom setting maybe isn't the best for some students. I try to change different teaching techniques and do student-directed learning, student-directed instruction. I think the fact that the students are taking ownership over it, and they become the experts, that might have something to do with it. The fact that there are so many different varieties of challenges and opportunities for them, that might have something to do with it, rather than this is what we're learning today, and this is how you're going to learn it. This is the strategy that we're talking about. It's more flexible in FUSE. That could have something to do with it. I've seen some of those hard-to-motivate students that come in here, and they work on one challenge the whole year, and that's the challenge that they like. That's the one they do a great job on. They perfect. They enjoy.

In other words, he specifically attributed the difference in Carmen’s and other students’ engagement between the two contexts to students “taking ownership” in FUSE, being able to

24 “become the experts”, having “different varieties of challenges and opportunities” and being able to choose one of interest and dive deeply into it (i.e., “I've seen some of those hard to motivate students that come in here, and they work on one challenge the whole year...”). So not only did Mr. Lewis recognize that Carmen had developed confidence and expertise at 3D printing, and that her engagement with the 3D printer in FUSE was different from her engagement in other classes, but he had also arrived at an understanding of how the FUSE context facilitated that development, citing choice and the opportunity for sustained interest-driven learning.

3.4. Carmen Recognizes Her Own Expertise and Describes Her Interest Development Carmen’s FUSE facilitator and classmates were not the only ones to recognize her emerging 3D printing expertise. During the second week that Mr. Lewis was absent, when the first author asked Carmen and another student, Elena, “What are you ladies working on today?”, Carmen replied, “Uh, actually, I'm helping her print, because I'm like the master of the printer now, and the computer so, yeah, I'm helping her print.” When the researcher followed up with her later in the class, asking, “So how did you become the 3D printing expert back here?”, she replied, “Well first, I saw how Mr. Lewis did it. He taught me, and then I just like started helping people do it.” In her statement, we can see not only her recognition of her role as master of the printer, but also a mention of being master of the computer (the one connected to the printer) and a reference to the process of learning by observing and pitching in that we’d observed earlier in the year. In her end-of-year interview, Carmen further explained her interest in the 3D printer and how she saw it connecting to her future career interests. The connection that she made, between her work with the 3D printer, an interest in becoming a doctor for cancer kids, and her emerging identity as someone who helps people, was unique and unexpected (See Figure 5).

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Figure 6. Carmen explains her interest in 3D printing in her end-of-year interview.

In the transcript in Figure 6, Carmen made two connections between her activities in FUSE and her future career aspirations. First, she made a connection between helping other people with the 3D printer and helping cancer kids (lines 4 and line 6). Second, she made a connection between fixing the printer and curing kids with cancer (line 10). This connection demonstrates the nuanced understanding Carmen had developed about what is involved in working with and attempting to fix a technical tool like the 3D printer and how that is related to diagnosing and treating disease in the human body. It also demonstrates the circuitous and

26 unexpected but productive routes interest pathways can take when students are allowed to forge them themselves. Carmen’s statements also help us understand what it was about the 3D printer that interested her. She cited both the work with the printer itself and her ability to help others print (line 4). She immediately connected this with a developing identity as a “generous person helping” (line 4). Then in lines 6 and 8, she continued, saying, “And when I grow up I wish to help cancer kids and become a doctor for them…So I'm starting now and helping people with the 3D printer.” These statements emphasize the ways in which interests can be tied to specific tools, practices, or social interactions, rather than to disciplinary content, as Carmen’s interest was in the tool (the 3D printer) and the practice of helping, not in the disciplines of design, engineering, or computer science. In fact, the connection Carmen made between 3D printing and medicine was based upon shared practices (helping and curing or fixing) not a shared discipline. Finally, in her end-of-year interview, Carmen explained the differences she saw between FUSE and other classes. Responding to the question “How is FUSE different from math or science?”, she said:

Ooh, good question. It is different from science and math, because in math...well, I think they're not that different, maybe, because you learn new stuff in math, and I'm still learning new stuff about the printer, because Mr. Lewis’s still teaching me, and Mr. Lewis teaches me in math, and Math Excel, and science, and I'm learning new things from there. It's different, because you- with the 3D printer you get to create your own things. In science and math, you have to do what the teacher says. In FUSE, you get to roam free and actually create your own builds, like this, Andy’s build.

27 Her answer helps us to understand what it was about FUSE that made it a different and productive environment for her interest development and learning. In contrasting FUSE with math and science, the aspect of FUSE that she focused on was that you “get to create your own things” and that unlike in science and math, where “you have to do what the teacher says,” in FUSE “you get to roam free and actually create your own builds…” In other words, Carmen identified the same important differences between FUSE and other school subjects that Mr. Lewis did – freedom to choose and take ownership of her own learning – thus providing further evidence for the consequentiality of these features of the FUSE activity system for cultivating interest development and interest-driven learning.

4. Discussion The analysis of Carmen’s case presented here informs our understanding of how interest develops. Revisiting our notion of interest pathways – dynamic, meandering lines of practice coconstructed by both individual interests and socio-material contexts – we can see each part of this definition captured in Carmen’s case. Carmen’s interest pathway meandered in unexpected ways, leading her to make surprising connections between her interests in the 3D printer and helping people and becoming a pediatric oncologist. This emphasizes the importance of Ingold’s (2011) notion of “tracing the multiple trails of becoming, wherever they lead” (p. 14) or attending to and following students’ interest pathways, both as they unfold and from the perspective of learners themselves, in order to understand how interest develops. Carmen’s case also informs our understanding of how interest leads to learning. The fact that the FUSE activity system allowed Carmen to choose activities of interest and pursue them for as long as she wanted in the way that she wanted, allowed her to not only discover and develop an interest in 3D printing but also to remain engaged enough to pursue and develop this

28 interest for an entire schoolyear. This afforded her an opportunity and the motivation to learn a number of specific, embodied, technical skills related to the 3D printer, as well as a number of STEM-relevant, meta-disciplinary skills, such as troubleshooting, mathematical and spatial reasoning, and collaboration and negotiation skills. In fact, by the end of the year, she’d developed a deep enough understanding of the process of troubleshooting the 3D printing that she was able to make an analogy between diagnosing and fixing problems with the printer and diagnosing and curing cancer patients. Therefore, her story suggests three important roles for interest in learning: (1) motivating sustained engagement, which creates opportunities for learning; (2) motivating a desire to solve problems (i.e., to put in the hard work required to persist and learn); and (3) producing learning that is more connected to other emerging interests, identities, and aspirations. Finally, Carmen’s case demonstrates the ways in which interest pathways are “coconstructed by both individual interests and socio-material contexts” as her interest pathway was constructed not just by her interests, but also by her interactions with tools (e.g., 3D printer, computer, cart, and Engineer Award), people (e.g., other students, substitute teacher, and Mr. Lewis) and specific cultural practices (e.g., learning by observing and pitching in, learning with and from other students, and the awarding of the Engineer Award) in the FUSE activity system. It’s important to notice that the thing about the 3D printer that was interesting to Carmen wasn’t necessarily the 3D printing challenges we’d designed, but the printer itself and helping others print. This echoes findings from Anderhag et al., (2016) and Azevedo (2013) that suggest that we shouldn’t assume that the topic itself is the thing that will spark and sustain students’ interests. It is also consequential that Carmen learned about 3D printing from watching Mr. Lewis, through a process of learning by observing and pitching in (Paradise & Rogoff, 2009) and was recognized for her expertise by other students in the class both informally (through them asking for help and

29 deferring to her authority) and formally (through the awarding of the Engineer Award), as this indicates the important role that social support and participation in a community of learners (Brown & Campione, 1994) plays in supporting interest development and learning. The important role that context played in shaping Carmen’s learning suggests design implications for both makerspaces and other learning environments. In particular, three aspects of the FUSE context seemed consequential in affording and shaping Carmen’s interest pathway. First, Carmen was allowed to choose what to work on and how – unlike in workshop-style making activities or school curricula where everyone does the same thing. However, she was supported in finding and pursuing a project of interest by the gallery of challenges provided as possible starting points – unlike in open-ended makerspaces, where participants are provided with tools but not necessarily scaffolding on how to use them or what possible projects they could do with them. Second, the fact that Mr. Lewis provided an opportunity for Carmen to learn by observing and pitching in (Paradise and Rogoff, 2009) allowed her to transition from learner to master of the 3D printer. Third, the Engineer Award and culture of peer helping and sharing of relative expertise (Stevens et al., 2016) created opportunities for Carmen to build confidence and deepen her interest and learning about the 3D printer. We suggest these consequential features of the FUSE activity system as design principles for learning environments that cultivate interest and interest-driven learning, both in and out of school. In particular, Carmen’s case shows what could be gained by changing the structure of formal schooling to look more like FUSE and accommodate more stories like Carmen’s: prolonged, interest-driven engagement, confidence, and learning. Although Carmen’s story is not that different from the interest development stories of the amateur astronomers described by Azevedo (2013) or the learning pathways of college engineering students described by Stevens et al. (2008), it is very different from the standardized learning pathways typically laid out for

30 students in schools (e.g., Azevedo, 2013; Becker, 1972, Hall & Stevens, 1995; Mead 1970; Paradise & Rogoff, 2009). Therefore, it is notable that her story could occur in school, and even more notable that both she and Mr. Lewis drew explicit contrasts between FUSE and the conventional classroom, crediting the same design features we’ve highlighted here as responsible for making FUSE a more interesting, engaging, and confidence-building learning environment. However, changing the structure of formal schooling to more closely resemble FUSE would require not only taking to heart the design principles laid out above, but also rethinking other parts of the standard package of “school.” For example, cultivating interest-driven learning like that experienced by Carmen in FUSE requires radically different roles for teachers, where they are neither dispensing knowledge nor prescribing pathways for students, but rather serving as facilitators as students seek out tools and information needed to forge their own pathways. Although the two-day professional development workshop we provide for new FUSE teachers provides some coaching on how to facilitate, rather than teach, more research is needed to understand what makes a good facilitator, how to prepare teachers to play this role, and what tools might be needed to support them in doing so. For example, drawing on research from Stevens (2000), we might examine how facilitators keep track of where each student or group is at in their projects (a difficult task when everyone is doing something different) or how and when it’s best to step in and offer guidance rather than letting students work things out themselves. This type of learning environment also requires radically rethinking how we measure learning, as assessments which are in any way standardized or divorced from the socio-material context in which the learning is situated are unlikely to effectively capture what is being learned. As, up to now, FUSE has managed to remain largely ungraded and unbeholden to disciplinary standards and accountability measures, the problem of how to systematically assess learning in this context is one with which we are only beginning to grapple. However, if this type of interest-

31 driven learning environment is to become commonplace in schools, this is an issue that will need to be addressed in future research. Finally, as we explore limitations of this study and avenues for further research, it is important to acknowledge the need to study the interest development and learning occurring in FUSE across both larger time scales and a more diverse set of FUSE studios. In other words, we need to ask whether the relatively short-term interests developed in FUSE endure and shape longer-term interests, identities, and pathways. We also need to ask for whom FUSE facilitates interest development and interest-driven learning, to ensure that experiences like Carmen’s are equitably accessible for a wide variety of students across different FUSE studio contexts.

5. Conclusion In summary, the work presented here addresses a gap in prior literature and the theme of this special issue by showing how a particular designed experience (FUSE) promotes interests – by affording specific relationships and interactions that allowed students to discover, sustain and develop those interests. We also showed how the discovery, sustained engagement with, and development of those interests led to learning. We did so by presenting the case of one student’s, Carmen’s, interest pathway through FUSE – a pathway that was idiosyncratic, dynamic, meandering, and co-constructed by both Carmen’s individual interests and the socio-material context of FUSE. From our analysis of Carmen’s interest pathway and the FUSE activity system that facilitated it, we proposed three roles for interest in learning: (1) motivating sustained engagement; (2) motivating a desire to solve problems; and (3) producing learning that is more connected to other emerging interests, identities, and aspirations. We also proposed three design principles for interest-driven learning environments: (1) choice; (2) opportunities for learning by

32 observing and pitching in; and (3) opportunities for the development, sharing, and recognition of students’ relative expertise. Drawing on our own analysis of the FUSE activity system, explicit contrasts made by our participants, and prior research, we described the contrast between the FUSE activity system and the conventional structure of school. We proposed that promoting interest-driven learning in school requires modifying the traditional infrastructure to look more like FUSE, and we laid out guidelines, challenges, and open questions that need to be addressed to move the design of school learning environments in that direction.

Acknowledgements This work was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) grants DRL-1348800 and DRL-1433724. However, any opinions, findings, conclusions, and/or recommendations are our own and do not reflect the views of the NSF. We would like to thank Jaakko Hilppö, Dionne Champion, and Peter Meyerhoff for their help with data collection and feedback on this work, as well as Kemi Jona, Henry Mann, and the members of the FUSE development team for their work developing and supporting FUSE. Finally, we would like to thank the administrators, teachers, and students at our partner schools for their participation in FUSE and our research.

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