Visualizing Student Makerspace Portfolios: Racial Diversity and Assessment in Makerspaces

Over the past two decades, the Makerspace movement has grown from a grassroots project to one that is widely considered main-stream. However, few studies have explored how these programs document student learning experiences and what they attended to show. This study aims to investigate the results of two consecutive surveys from 77 Makerspace sites to relay a complicated story about the people, programs, and practices involved in making. Information visualization (IV) refers to a collection of representation to present synthesized and visualized information. IV provides a promising way to present complex data and enable the audience to develop an overview quickly as well as examine specific information. By analyzing and transferring the survey data into visualizations, we address some of the challenges researchers face in dealing with survey data and how those challenges can be over-come. We also elaborated the details of our design from on an iterative process of prototyping, testing, analyzing, and refining data visualizations. The immediate objective of this study was to develop a modular, interactive, and informative tool illustrating the unique characteristics and potential impact of the Makerspace movement. Results show that graphic manipulation techniques enable users to make sense of multidimensional data and provide the flexibility to communicate the results to a broader audience.