A Pathway to Explore 
the Transformative Potential of 
Repair in STEAM and Maker Programs

Repair offers powerful opportunities for deepening the educational potential of maker programs. It’s well known that maker education goes far in fostering thinking skills and creativity, as well as interest, knowledge and technical skills in STEM subject matter. Incorporating repair into maker programs enriches that learning, while at the same time creating space for cross-disciplinary work and addressing other pressing educational objectives, such as climate literacy and student agency.

The material below develops these ideas and is followed by suggested steps and resources for integrating repair into existing maker programs and tinker spaces.

Whether you're interested in the practical, the technical, the artistic, or any other aspects of repair, you'll find rich inspiration throughout The Culture of Repair Project website. 

Be sure to explore our Educator Resource Library, Notes from the Field, and other sections for tools, stories, insights, funding opportunities, and connections to a broader network of educators and advocates teaching youth about repair.

Ways Repair Enriches Maker Programs

Thinking and Technical Skills

Repair calls on the skills and thinking processes central to maker education, yet takes them further. In many circumstances, working within the constraints of the broken object requires deeper understanding and more creative problem-solving than making things from scratch.

The limitations of the broken object include:

• The materials it’s made of

• The condition of the materials

• Its parts and how they work together

• The object’s function

• The availability of replacement parts

• The importance of aesthetics, or not, or of authenticity to its original condition.

Additional factors come into play if the broken object belongs to or is important to the student, or if the environmental implications of its going to landfill are understood.

Coming up against limitations – whether they be technical or personal – pushes thinking and skills forward and ties learning into more dimensions of the student’s life experience than do just concepts.

Tip: Partner with a science colleague – physics or chemistry.

Repair brings caring for the environment squarely into maker programs

Integrating repair into maker programs vastly expands the relevance of those programs to our contemporary world.

Aiming maker skills and thinking at repairing objects means keeping things in service longer, which means reducing carbon emissions and preserving resources. 3-D printing replacement parts to repair a discontinued but otherwise perfectly functional object creates another way of caring for the Earth.

Speaking practically, harnessing maker programs to the momentum behind addressing environmental change contributes to maintaining support for maker education. Cultivating the capacity and inclination of students to repair rather than toss and repurchase links maker education with sustainability.

Tip: Partner with your Climate Literacy Program or other sustainability program, and/or a science or social studies colleague – environmental science, biology, civics.

Repair reveals systems and design

When a student’s object breaks, their personal involvement with it enables them to see design and systems more clearly:

• A student acquired an item to serve a purpose.

• It fulfilled the need.

• It broke – perhaps easily, inexplicably.

• It no longer serves its purpose.

Repair-inflected maker skills and inclinations transform a reflexive “toss and repurchase”, into a decision point: “Toss and repurchase, or consider repair?”

Considering repair leads the student to ask:

• How is the object designed?

• Why did this break?

• Why was it designed like this?

• Who made it this way?

• Could it have been designed differently?

• What concerns informed its design?

• Whose concerns informed its design?

• Are those concerns consistent with my interests?

The student’s personal stake in the item highlights the design concerns informing the item's manufacture. Systems and design are no longer conceptual, classroom topics. The student is personally involved and has a stake in the situation and its resolution.

These questions naturally lead students to explore:

• Product design and engineering

• Manufacturing decisions and their motivations

• Whose needs are prioritized in design — and whose are overlooked?

Many Systems are Explored Through Repair:

• Economic systems – linear vs. circular economy, capitalism, consumption

• Environmental systems – ecology, resource use, waste

• Physiological systems – sensory, cognitive, and motor interactions

• Political systems – Right to Repair, regulation, corporate accountability

• Social systems – agency, equity, community care

• Psychological/economic systems – marketing, branding, desire, identity

Tip: Partner with a social studies colleague.

Repair Deepens Student Engagement

When students are personally invested in fixing their own objects:

• Conceptual knowledge becomes experiential

• Motivation arises from a personal stake, not external expectations

• Learning extends beyond the classroom and into daily life

Tip: Have students bring in their own things to repair.

Support 

The resources and pathways below are offered to support introducing and integrating repair into your maker programs. 

Tip: Use this guide to advocate for incorporating repair into your school's maker program. S
hare it with colleagues and administrators to build momentum and support.

Ways to Introduce Repair into Maker Programs

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